The One Who Arrives First And Alone

Twenty past six, every week, for four years.

The others come at seven. That is right and it is what was agreed and nobody is late.

Between twenty past six and seven she does this: lights, heating, chairs out of the stack and into a circle, the urn on because it takes eighteen minutes, the table, the cups, the thing with the door that has to be wedged, and a walk round the room picking up whatever the group before left.

Forty minutes. Alone. Two hundred times.

She is not resentful. She has checked for that carefully because she knows what resentment looks like in other people and she does not find it in herself, and when they arrive at seven she is genuinely glad to see them.

In May she was in the stock cupboard getting cups down and she cried for about ninety seconds and then stopped and went out and did the evening.

She has no explanation for it. Nothing had happened. It was a Tuesday.

Here is what she has never said to anybody, and it is not about chairs.

It is not the setting up. The setting up is forty minutes of ordinary work and she is fifty three and perfectly capable.

It is that by the time the door opens at seven, she has already been running for forty minutes, and everybody else walks in fresh, and the evening starts, and she is the one holding it. Then it ends and they go, warmly, and she stacks the chairs and turns the urn off and does the lights and drives home at about ten past ten.

Nobody has ever seen her pick anything up. That is the whole of it and it took her three months after the cupboard to get to that sentence.

That thou bear it not thyself alone

Sit down on one of those chairs a minute, because there is a passage where God intervenes about exactly this, and the reason He gives is not spiritual, it is structural.

Moses has told God he cannot do it. He says the burden is too heavy and he says it in the plainest possible terms, and nowhere in the chapter is he rebuked for saying so.

And I will come down and talk with thee there: and I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not thyself alone.Numbers 11:17

That thou bear it not thyself alone.

That is the reason, stated by God, at the end of the sentence. Not so that more gets done. Not so that Moses can rest and come back stronger. So that he does not carry it by himself.

And notice the mechanism. He does not lighten the burden and He does not remove it. He takes of the spirit that is on the man and puts it on seventy others, and the same burden is then carried by seventy one people.

Hear this at twenty past six. You are not complaining, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has God Himself naming solitary carrying as the problem and acting on it directly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that hall at twenty past six for two hundred weeks.

Now let me name the ninety seconds in the cupboard, because you have no explanation and there is one.

Nothing had happened. That is exactly right and it is the point.

A weight that is never named and never shared does not go anywhere, which is precisely why the written word has God spreading one and why the Holy Spirit is in the spreading. It accumulates. And accumulated weight does not come out on the hard weeks, because on the hard weeks you are braced; it comes out on an ordinary Tuesday, in a stock cupboard, reaching for cups, for ninety seconds, for no reason at all.

That was not a breakdown and it is not a warning sign. It was a pressure release on a system that has been sealed for four years.

Hear this too, and let it change twenty past six. You are not required to carry it invisibly, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has God addressing this without one word of rebuke to the man who said it was too heavy, and the Spirit of God has never once asked a woman to be the only person in a room who is already running when the door opens.

And here is the thing about the others, which is the part that will surprise you.

They have not left you to it. They arrive at seven because seven is what was agreed, four years ago, probably by you, and nobody has ever revisited it.

Not one of those people knows about the eighteen minutes for the urn.