Somebody Put a Stone Under Him

The standpipe at the top of the allotment path runs slow, and everybody who has a plot here knows it, and everybody stands there anyway with a can under the tap because there is no other way to do it.

Eleven years he has been coming. Plot fourteen, the one with the bean canes and the wheelbarrow with the flat tire that he keeps meaning to see to. On a good Saturday there are six or seven people up here, bent over their own rows, calling something across now and then about slugs.

And for most of those eleven years he prayed while the can filled. Not a scheme, not a discipline with a name. Just the two or three minutes of standing there with his hand on the tap, and it turned into the steadiest praying of his week without anybody deciding it should.

He could not tell you when it stopped. That is the honest part. There was no evening where he thought, I will not do that any more. It thinned, the way a path through grass thins when two or three fewer people walk it, and now he stands at the tap and looks at his phone.

And here is the sentence underneath it, the one he has never said out loud to a living soul: if I stopped coming altogether, nobody would ring.

Not out of unkindness. Everybody is busy and the plot is his business and people mind their own. But he has done the arithmetic, and the arithmetic says he could go quiet, this year, entirely, and the only thing that would notice is the bindweed.

You have your own version of that sentence and it is not about an allotment. You know exactly which quiet thing you could stop.

Nobody is asked to hold their own arms up

There is a small scene in Exodus that never gets a stained glass window and it is one of the most practical things in the book.

Israel is fighting in the valley. Moses is up on the hill with his hands raised, and while his hands are up things go one way, and when they come down things go the other. And then this:

But Moses' hands grew heavy, 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 actually in that verse. Nobody tells him to try harder. Nobody suggests he was insufficiently committed to holding his own arms up. Somebody looks at a tired man and fetches a stone, and two people take an elbow each, and the day is held.

You were never designed to be the only pair of hands under your own life. That is not my opinion about human nature. The written word puts the stone and the two friends into the middle of the story on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been steadying arms in this way ever since, usually through somebody ordinary who happens to be standing next to you.

The thinning is not a verdict

Before we go further, let me take something off the table, because this is where a reader gets hurt.

The two or three minutes at the tap did not thin because you stopped loving God. Things thin. Nothing was decided, nothing was rejected, and eleven years of faithfulness did not get canceled by a season of looking at your phone while a can fills. This is not an alarm and I am not going to make it one.

You are held right now by a God who guards what was handed to Him, and the guarding did not pause while the praying did. Scripture says He is able to keep what has been entrusted to Him until that day, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the keeping while you do the noticing. You guard what you were given. He guards you. The site would be a lie if it ran the first half without the second.

Noticing early is kindness, not accusation. It is the same thing as spotting that a bean cane has worked loose before the wind takes the whole row.

Being witnessed is provision, not weakness

Here is the belief I actually want to go after, because it is the one keeping a good man alone on plot fourteen.

Somewhere along the way you decided that needing to be seen by another human being is a deficiency. That a properly grown believer manages unwitnessed, that mentioning it would be a sort of begging, and that the people who have somebody just got lucky. So you have made the not-being-noticed into a private test of your own seriousness, and you have been passing it for years, at some cost.

You have been given people on purpose, and being kept alongside somebody is God's provision rather than a gap in your character. The word does not treat Aaron and Hur as a concession to a weak leader, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a person in your path at the right moment and then lets it look like a coincidence about beans. The stone was not an insult. It was a chair.

And if you are reading this and there genuinely is nobody, today, not one person: you are not outside anything. God is the one who notices, first and last, and He does not need a witness to confirm that a Saturday counted. Psalm 139:3 says He is acquainted with all your ways, and it is His Spirit who has been on that plot beside you every week nobody else was. Nothing in this piece is a bill you cannot pay.