They Talk To You Like A Service

He counted the messages one night, which he does not recommend to anybody.

Forty one messages in his phone from that week. He went through them in bed with the screen turned right down, and he sorted them into two piles in his head, and the two piles were these: messages that asked him for something, and messages that did not.

Thirty nine and two.

The two were from his brother, who lives four hours away and does not go to church, and who had sent him a photograph of a fish and then, an hour later, a second photograph of the same fish from a slightly better angle.

The other thirty nine were fine. That is the thing he wants understood before anything else. Not one of them was rude. Not one of them was from a person who does not care about him. They were requests from people in genuine need, sent to somebody they trust, which is exactly what he asked God for when he was twenty four and praying on a beach about whether he could do this.

But he noticed that eleven of them opened with no greeting at all. Just the ask. And he noticed that four of them contained the phrase are you free, and that not one of the forty one contained the word how.

And then he found the one from the Tuesday. It was from a man he thinks the world of, a good man, and it said: sorry, I know it is late, but that is what you are there for.

He is not angry about it. He has never been angry about it, and he is not going to start now. He knows exactly what that man meant and he knows it was said with warmth.

He just lay there with the phone on his chest and understood, with a clarity he did not enjoy, that somewhere over about nine years he had stopped being a person in the minds of people who love him and had quietly become a facility. Something with opening hours. Something you use when you need it and do not otherwise think about, the way nobody wonders how the water is doing.

And then he did the thing that hurt, which was to admit that he taught them that. Not on purpose. He taught it by always answering, and by never once saying that he had nothing left, and by being so consistently available that availability stopped being a gift he gave and became a property he had.

God took the feeding back off everybody

There is a chapter in Ezekiel that people avoid preaching because the first half is heavy. Stay with it, because the turn in the middle of it is one of the great mercies in the prophets.

The first half is God's complaint about how the flock has been fed. And then, in the middle of it, God stops talking about who should be doing it and says what He is going to do instead.

I will feed my flock, and I will cause them to lie down, saith the Lord GOD.Ezekiel 34:15

I will feed. I will cause them to lie down.

He does not reorganize the rota. He does not issue a better standard. He takes the whole job onto Himself, in the first person, twice in one verse, and He does it in a chapter about exhausted and neglected sheep.

Now hold that against your phone. Because here is what I want you to hear, and I want you to hear it as the plain thing it is: you are one of the sheep in that verse. Not the staff. Not the utility. One of the ones He said He would feed and cause to lie down, and there has never been a moment when your name came off that list because you happened to also carry a crook. That is not my consolation for you. It is what His word says in Ezekiel 34, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a verse like that off a page and puts it into a man lying in the dark with a phone on his chest.

But before any of that lands, let me say the honest thing, because you have had enough people skip it.

That is a real wound. It is not oversensitivity and it is not pride. Being spoken to as a function for nine years does something to a person, and the fact that every one of those thirty nine people is kind does not undo it, and the fact that you taught them to do it does not make you the villain of your own tiredness. A wound that came from a good arrangement is still a wound. Scripture never once asks anybody to pretend a thing did not cost what it cost, and the Holy Spirit is not the one telling you to be reasonable about this at one in the morning.

Now, with that named and not rushed past, look again at the verse.

The reason it matters that God says I will feed is that it takes the feeding out of the economy you have been living in. In that economy, care is something that flows one way, and the person at the source of the flow can only ever be drained by it. Ezekiel says the flow starts somewhere else entirely. It starts with God, it comes through the shepherds, and the shepherds are standing in it, getting wet, whether or not one single person notices.

You have been fed this whole time. Not by the messages, and not by the thanks, and not by any of the things that stopped arriving somewhere around year six. His word says He does the feeding directly, and the Holy Spirit has been doing it in a man who assumed he was running on fumes, in ways he has been too tired to see.

And here is the one I want to leave with you. Nothing about you is measured by how you are addressed. You are not what the shortest message in your phone thinks you are. God has never once used another person's tone as evidence in a case about who you are, and Ezekiel 34 is the chapter where He says out loud that the condition of the flock is His business and not a scoreboard hanging round the neck of the one carrying it.

Let me say one more thing plainly, because this is written for somebody running low. If it has gone past tiredness recently, if there have been thoughts with that phone in your hand that you would not say out loud to anyone, please do not hold that on your own tonight. In the United States you can call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one actual person who can be with you before you sleep. That is not a failure of calling. That is a sheep being caused to lie down, and God is the one who wrote that He would do it.