The Last Mile Is Not Yours To Carry

He has spent his whole working life making sure things do not fall over.

That is not a metaphor. He built and ran things for a living, and he was good at it in the particular way that involves lying awake working out what could go wrong and then quietly making sure it cannot.

He is sixty two. He is winding down. There is a garden and there are grandchildren and there is a table under some lights that he strung up himself and is unreasonably pleased about.

Here is what he has started doing, and he has told nobody, and he would be a bit embarrassed to be asked.

He has started planning his own faithfulness the way he used to plan a job.

Contingencies. What happens if his health goes. What happens if his mind goes. What happens if the church he has been in for thirty years stops being somewhere he can be. What happens if the grandchildren move abroad and the reason he gets up in the morning goes with them.

He runs those scenarios at about four in the morning and he does not tell his wife because she would worry, and it is not worry exactly. It is planning. It is the thing he is good at.

But somewhere underneath the planning there is a sentence he has never said out loud, and it is this.

Whether I finish this well is on me, and I had better have the contingencies.

If that is anywhere near you, come and sit at this table. There is no warning here and nothing is at risk in the way you have been imagining.

Read who is carrying whom

There is a sentence in Isaiah that was written to people who were watching everything they trusted get carried away on carts, and it is one of the great sentences.

Even to your old age I am He, and to grey hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear. I will carry and will save.Isaiah 46:4

Four verbs in a row and every one of them belongs to God. Made. Bear. Carry. Save. And the direction is the whole point of the chapter, because the passage just before it is about idols being loaded onto animals, gods that have to be carried by the people who own them.

The contrast Isaiah draws is not between a strong god and a weak one. It is between a god you carry and a God who carries you.

And that is exactly the question sitting under your four in the morning planning.

You are being carried, and the carrying goes all the way to the end of it. Isaiah 46:4 names old age and gray hairs specifically and puts them inside God's own undertaking, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the guarantee of the inheritance in Ephesians 1:14, which means the years you are running contingencies for are already inside somebody else's promise.

Planning is not the same as carrying

Now I want to be careful here, because you are a competent man and I am not going to tell you that competence is a sin.

There is nothing wrong with thinking ahead. Nothing here is an argument against sense, and if you want to sort out a will and a power of attorney and who has the spare key, that is love and not anxiety.

The thing that has happened is subtler than that, and you know it, which is why the sentence at four in the morning has never been said out loud.

You have moved your own perseverance onto the list of things you are personally responsible for delivering. And that is a different item from a will, because it is the one item on that list that was never yours.

You are not the contractor on your own finishing, and you never signed for it. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began the good work is the one who brings it to completion, and it is His Spirit who is the seal on it, so the project you have been quietly running was never actually assigned.

Jude ends his letter the same way. To Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. Able to keep. Able to present. Not one of those verbs belongs to the man being kept, and the destination is not survival, it is joy, and the joy is His idea before it is ever yours.

And I am not going to tell you how the years will actually go. Nobody can and nobody should, and any article that hands you a prediction about your own health or your own family is selling you something.

But there is no alarm here either. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held tonight. Isaiah 40:28 says He does not faint or grow weary and His understanding is unsearchable, and it is His Spirit within you who keeps a person going long past the point where their own planning ran out.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The lights over that table are not what is holding the family up, and neither are your contingencies.