You Drive Home With None Of It

He noticed it at a friend's fiftieth, which was supposed to be the one where nothing was expected of him.

Old friends. Nobody from his church. A garden, a fire pit, about twenty people, and he had driven two hours specifically to be a person at a party rather than a man in a role.

And by half past nine he was sat on a low wall at the end of that garden with a woman he had met an hour before, who was telling him about her father, and he was doing it. Doing the thing. Listening properly, saying the right things at the right times, not rushing her, watching her face.

She needed it and he was glad to be there and it was not a hardship. And when it finished she went and got another drink and he sat there on the wall for a second and thought: I have done this at every single gathering I have attended in eleven years.

Every one. Weddings. Christmas at his brother's. A neighbor's barbecue in the summer where a man he barely knows told him about his marriage between the burgers and the pudding.

It is not that he is asked. That is what nobody understands. Nobody at that party knew what he did for a living. It is not the job, it is the shape he has been worn into, and it happens within about forty minutes of arriving anywhere, and it is now entirely automatic and he does not choose it.

So he drives home from things. That is the ordinary experience of his life: two hours there, four hours of being useful, two hours back, and nothing of the evening in him at all.

He said to himself in the car that night, on a dark road, that he cannot remember the last time he was in a room and not working.

He was not upset when he said it. He said it the way you notice the mileage.

The clause about the ones who are carrying

Let me say at the top what this is, and then keep to it.

There is nothing at the end of this for you to do. No practice, no rule about parties, no boundary to set, and nothing to tell anybody. If a line of this turns into an instruction then it has failed and you can drop it. You are being handed something and asked for nothing. It is the Holy Spirit who does the carrying here, which is what separates a word being spoken over you from a phrase being repeated at you.

Now. There is a verse in Isaiah 40 that everybody knows the first half of.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

The famous half is the lambs. Gathered with an arm, carried in the chest, and it is a beautiful picture and it gets put on cards.

The half nobody quotes is the last clause, and it is the one written for you.

Those that are with young. The ewes carrying lambs. Not the lambs being carried, and not the ones without anything on them. The animals in that flock who are themselves carrying something, whose weight is inside them, who cannot go at the pace the rest go at because of what they are carrying.

And what does the shepherd do about them?

He does not carry them. You cannot carry a full grown ewe and it would be no use to her if you could. He gently leads them, which means he changes his own pace. The whole flock goes slower because of the ones that are with young, and the slowing is the shepherd's doing and not a concession the animals had to ask for.

So hear this, on a dark road two hours from a party: there is a clause in that verse about the ones who are carrying, and you are in it. That is not my application; it is what His word says the Shepherd does about a specific group in the flock, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a farming detail out of an eighth century poem and lays it over a man driving home from his own friend's fiftieth.

Now let me say the plain thing about the wall in that garden.

That was not a failure. You have been treating it a bit like one since, as though a man who cannot go to a party without working is a man who has lost something. He has not. The reason you did it is that a woman needed to talk about her father and you are somebody who notices that, and noticing is not a wound, it is a good thing that has become tiring, which is different.

And you did not choose it, and you are right about that, and it is worth saying out loud that a thing you did not choose is not a thing you can be blamed for.

You are gently led, in the present tense, at a pace that has already been adjusted for what you carry. Scripture puts that adjustment on the Shepherd's side entirely, and the Holy Spirit has been setting the pace of your life to that clause for eleven years whether or not you have felt it happening.

And here is the thing I want you to have about the driving home.

You have been reading the empty two hours as evidence that you get nothing. But a ewe with young does not walk slowly because she is being deprived. She walks slowly because there is something in her, and the something is the reason for the pace, and the pace exists for her sake.

The tiredness you drive home with is not a leak. It is the weight of what you were carrying on the way there.