The Two Who Held Up His Hands

Twelve chairs, more or less, and he has to borrow four of them from the kitchen every week.

Six years of Thursdays in that room. It started with three people and a pot of tea and no intention of becoming anything, and it has never become anything either, which he counts as a success.

He does not preach. He opens something up and people talk. He is very good at the bit where somebody says a thing that costs them and the room does not rush past it.

Everybody in that circle has been held up by him at some point. He knows which two are having a hard year. He knows the one who is not sleeping. He knows what happened to the young man in the corner and has never told anybody.

And three weeks ago, after they had all gone and he was carrying chairs back to the kitchen, he stood in his own hallway with a chair in each hand and had the thought.

Every person in that room is held by me and not one of them is holding me.

Not because they would not. That is the part he could not get away from. Any one of them would, instantly, if he said a word.

It is that he has never said the word, and after six years the shape of the room is simply set, and the shape is that he is the floor and they are the people standing on it, and nobody put that arrangement in place on purpose.

He has told nobody. Obviously.

If you are the floor in a room somewhere, sit down in one of these chairs. Nothing here is going to become a confession.

Somebody had to hold up the hands

There is a scene in Exodus that everybody remembers for the wrong reason.

But Moses' hands grew weary, 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.Exodus 17:12

People remember this as a story about persistence. It is actually a story about staffing.

Look at what is being described. The man everybody in that camp was depending on could not do the thing on his own for a whole afternoon, and the solution was not that he found more resolve. The solution was a rock and two men.

And notice that nobody in the passage treats this as a scandal. There is no suggestion that Moses had let anybody down. It is written down as an ordinary provision, in the same tone as everything else that day.

You were made to be held up as well as to hold, and that is provision rather than failure. Exodus 17:12 puts two men under one man's arms without a word of criticism, and it is the Holy Spirit who sets people alongside people in the first place, so needing somebody under your hands is the arrangement working rather than a fault in the man who runs the room.

The word has never been said, and it is a short word

Now let me name the real obstacle, because it is not pride, whatever you may have told yourself.

It is the shape of the room. Six years of Thursdays have set into a form, and you can feel that if you say one true thing on a Thursday the whole geometry changes and everybody has to work out where to stand.

Fair enough. So do not say it on a Thursday.

Nobody is proposing a group, a rota, an accountability arrangement, which this site does not hand anybody and I am not about to start. Nobody is asking you to open your interior in your own front room while twelve people hold their tea.

One person. One true sentence. On a Tuesday, in a car park, on the phone.

I run that room and nobody in it knows how I am. I have not been held up by anybody in about six years and I set it up that way without meaning to. I am fine, and I would like one person to actually know that I am.

That is the entire ask. It makes nobody responsible for you. It simply means a thing that lived only inside you now lives between two people, and from that moment there is somebody who could notice.

You have permission to be carried as well as to carry, and it does not cost you the room. Galatians 6:2 says to bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and the one another is doing all the work in that sentence, and it is the Spirit who binds a people together, which means a man who lets one person in has not stopped being the one who opens the door.

And here is the ground it stands on. God is the one keeping you while you keep everybody else. You are already known completely, and you were never actually alone in that hallway. Psalm 139:3 says He is acquainted with all your ways, and it is His Spirit who has been in that circle every Thursday, so nobody knowing is not the same as nobody watching.