Somebody Has to Hold the Hands Up

Four hundred and twelve.

He counted them one night in February because he could not sleep, and once he had started he could not stop until he had gone through the whole book. A hardback notebook with an elastic band round it, one name to a line, the date beside it, sometimes a word or two so he would remember what it was about. Scan on the ninth. Court thing. Twins. Dad. The word Dad on its own, three times, three different people, three different Dads.

Four hundred and twelve names in eleven months. He prayed for every one of them, some of them for weeks, some of them at three in the morning with the phone still warm in his hand.

He sat with the book open on his knees at the kitchen table and did a thing he has never told anybody about. He went through it again looking for his own name.

Not literally. He knew it was not in there. He was looking for the memory of somebody saying it. Somebody putting a hand on his shoulder in a doorway and saying his name to God, out loud, the way he has done four hundred and twelve times this year for other people.

He got all the way to the end of the year and could not find one.

Not because nobody loves him. They do. He knows they do. People are kind, and people say thank you, and somebody left a card. But being loved and being covered are two different things, and he has spent a year on one side of a line he did not know he had drawn, and the line is this: everyone in that book is somebody he holds. Nobody in that book knows he needs holding.

He shut the elastic band round it and turned the light off and sat there in the dark for a while, in a kitchen that smelled of the dinner he had not eaten, and did not pray at all, because he could not think what he would say that would not sound like complaining.

So. That is where you are, more or less. Different numbers, same book.

And I want to tell you at the very top what this is, so that you can put your guard down and keep it down: nothing is going to be asked of you here. Not a discipline, not a rhythm, not a rethink. There is no point at the end of this where I turn round and hand you something to do. You are not being equipped tonight. You are being sat down.

The arms went heavy, and that was the story

There is a moment in Exodus that is nearly always taught as being about Moses, and I want to hand it to you the other way round tonight.

The battle is going on in the valley. Moses is up the hill with his hands lifted, and while his hands are up the thing goes well, and when they come down it goes badly. Everything depends on those hands staying up, and here is what happens next.

But Moses' hands grew weary, so they took a stone and put it under him, and he sat on it, while Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side, and the other on the other side. So his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.Exodus 17:12

Read what is written there, and notice what is not.

There is no rebuke. Nobody says, Moses, you of all people. Nobody suggests he should have prepared better, or risen earlier, or had more faith about his own arms. His hands grew weary, which is the plainest sentence in the chapter, and the whole of Scripture lets it stand without one word of comment. The arms of the man carrying it got heavy, and that is simply reported, the way you would report the weather.

And then two other men do the only thing that was ever going to work. They find him a stone to sit on. And then they get underneath.

His hands were steady, the text says. His hands. It still counts as his. Nobody took the job off him and nobody wrote a note in the margin saying he only managed it with help. The hands that were held up were his hands, and the day held, and the sun went down on a man who had been carried.

That is what a covering is. It is not a title and it is not a structure. It is somebody under your arms so the arms can stay where they are.

You are covered tonight, and the covering was arranged for you rather than organized by you. It is written that Aaron and Hur held up his hands, one on one side and the other on the other, so that his hands were steady until the going down of the sun (Exodus 17:12), and the Holy Spirit is the One who puts that same arrangement around a man who has been holding his arms up since February.

And here is the part I most want you to have, because it is the part that answers the notebook. God did not stand at the top of that hill and say, Moses, your arms are heavy, try harder. He arranged a stone and two men. The provision for the exhausted intercessor in that story is not more resolve. It is other hands, and a place to sit.

Which means the thing you have been quietly ashamed of all year, the fact that your arms are heavy, is not a disqualification and it is not a secret you are keeping from God. He can see. He has always been able to see. And He has never once been disappointed by the weight of a pair of arms that have been up since February.

You are not keeping a secret from God about those arms, and you have never once been charged with the weight of them. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes remembers there a tender word rather than a disappointed one, in a room where nobody has asked how you are since the spring.

Let me say one more thing plainly, and then I will stop. If this year has gone past tired and into somewhere darker, if there have been thoughts you would not say out loud in your own kitchen, please do not carry that one alone tonight. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line or emergency number, and one human being who can sit with you before you sleep. That is not a failure of calling. That is a stone to sit on, and God puts those in the world on purpose.