The Youngest On The Crew Keeps Asking Him

The lad is nineteen and he has been on that crew about eight months.

He asks a lot of questions, most of them about the work, and about a third of the way through those eight months the questions started including one that was not about the work.

He asked, twice now, how the older man keeps going.

Not chattily. Both times it came at the end of a long day, both times when they were the last two doing something, and both times the boy had clearly been sitting on it.

And both times the man said, honestly, you are asking the wrong person.

He believes that. That is the thing. It is not a deflection in his own mind, it is an accurate assessment, and he could give you the list.

He has been doing this work for twenty-two years and he is tired in a way he has never described to anybody. There is a stretch every February where he does not want to get up and he gets up anyway. He would not describe himself as a man of any depth. He does not read. He would not know what to say if somebody asked him what he believes, in words.

What he does is get up, and go, and do the work properly, and be steady with the people around him, and pray in a way so short and plain that he has never once called it praying.

None of that has ever looked to him like something a person could hand somebody.

And the boy has asked twice.

And here is the thing he has never considered: the boy has watched him for eight months at close range, including February, and asked afterward.

That is not somebody asking for a philosophy. That is somebody who has already seen the answer and wants to know its name.

And you have said the same thing. Somebody asked, and you said you are the wrong person, and you meant it, and you have never looked down at what is actually in your hands.

What is that in your hand

There is a moment at a burning bush which is one of the shortest and most useful questions in Scripture.

A man has been arguing about his own inadequacy at some length. He has raised who am I, and what if they do not believe me, and he is going to raise his speech shortly.

And in the middle of it, God asks him this.

The Lord said to him, "What is that in your hand?" He said, "A staff."Exodus 4:2

A staff. A stick he uses for work, that he has been carrying around for forty years without ever once thinking about it, and which he would not have listed if you had asked him what he had.

It is the most ordinary object in the account and it is what the whole of the next chapter runs on.

You are holding something ordinary that you have never once counted, and that is the specific thing the question is asking about. It is written that the Lord said to him, what is that in your hand (Exodus 4:2), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man look down at a thing he has been carrying for decades without seeing.

Now your list, because it is honest and it is worth going through.

Twenty-two years of the work. Tired in a way you have never described. A February every year where you get up anyway. No reading. No words for what you believe.

Read it again as an inventory rather than a disqualification.

Twenty-two years of turning up is not nothing to a boy of nineteen who is eight months in and already wondering whether he can do this for a life. That is precisely the question underneath the question.

You have twenty-two years in your hand and it has never once been on your own list of what you have. Scripture says let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up (Galatians 6:9), and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept a tired man getting up through twenty-two Februaries, which is a work of His and not a personality trait.

And the praying you have never called praying.

Short and plain, and so ordinary that it does not seem to qualify. That is a description of most of the actual praying that has ever been done by anybody. The long and eloquent kind is a small minority of it and always has been.

You have been praying for years and the reason you do not call it that is that nobody ever told you it counted. It is written that when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think they will be heard for their many words (Matthew 6:7), and it is His Spirit who carries what is short and real, which is the kind He was explicitly asking for in that instruction.

And the eight months.

The boy has been three feet away from you through a whole February. He has seen the tiredness. He is not asking despite having seen it; he is asking because of it, because a man who is visibly tired and still turning up is a far more useful thing to a nineteen year old than a man who finds it easy.

You are being asked precisely because of the part of yourself you would have hidden. Scripture says my grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9), and it is the Holy Spirit who has made a tired man legible to a young one at close range over eight months, which nobody can do on purpose.