Everything Comes Over the Counter

The shop opens at seven and by half past he has heard three things he cannot forget.

That is not an exaggeration and he could give you today's. A woman came in for bread and told him her sister is not speaking to her. A man in his sixties told him about a scan, standing there holding a carton of milk, and then said please do not mention it to anybody. And the young mother who comes in most mornings said nothing at all, which he has learned to read, and he asked her one question and she stood in the doorway for eleven minutes.

Nine years of this. Nobody set it up. There is something about a counter, and something about a face people see most days, and about the fact that he cannot walk away because he works there.

He is good at it. He would not say so but he is. He has never once passed a thing on that was told him quietly.

And here is what has been happening for the last eighteen months, which he has not said to his wife.

He carries it home. Not all of it. But enough that he has begun lying awake with other people's arithmetic running. The sister who is not speaking. The scan, which he cannot ask about because he was asked not to. The eleven minutes in the doorway, and whether one question was the right one or whether he should have said something else.

He has no counter. That is the plainest way to put it. There is no place he stands where somebody who sees him every day says how are you and waits.

The sentence, unsaid: everything comes over the counter and nothing goes back the other way.

You may know that shape. The place where it all arrives, and no arrangement at all for you.

God distributes a load rather than admiring it

There is a scene in the wilderness that goes against everything anybody has ever told a man like him, and God is the one who does it.

Moses has been carrying an entire nation and he says so, out loud, in language that would alarm anybody who heard it. He tells God the burden is too heavy and that he cannot carry all these people alone.

God does not correct him. He does not commend his endurance. He does not tell him to draw on hidden reserves.

And I will take of the spirit which is upon thee, and will put it upon them; and they shall bear the burden of the people with thee, that thou bear it not thyself alone.Numbers 11:17

Read what He does. He takes what is on the man and puts it on seventy others so that the load can be shared. The whole intervention is redistribution, arranged by God, at the man's request, without one word of rebuke.

You are not being asked to carry a street on your own, and Numbers 11:17 has God dividing a load rather than praising the man holding it, and it is His Spirit who takes an arrangement made in a desert and lands it on a man behind a counter at seven in the morning.

Saying it out loud is what starts it

Consider the order of events, because the order is the practical part.

Moses says it. That comes first. He puts the weight into words and hands it to God, in what is frankly a complaint, and the response is not a scolding, it is a solution.

He has never said it. Nine years of taking things over a counter and he has never once put into words what it costs, not to God and not to his wife, and part of him has assumed that saying it would be a kind of betrayal of the people who told him things.

You have permission to say the true weight of it, because the written word records the complaint and the answer in the same passage with no correction in between, and the Spirit of God is what turns that from an interesting scene into a sentence a man can actually say.

And notice what God moves in order to fix it. Not the circumstances. The Spirit. He takes of the Spirit and distributes it, which means the answer to an overloaded man in Scripture is a fresh distribution of the Spirit of God rather than a lighter schedule.

You are being offered more of God rather than fewer people, and Numbers 11 solves the problem by putting the Spirit on more shoulders rather than by emptying the desert, and the same Spirit who was distributed that day is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one man

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Nine years of other people's crises coming across a counter, with nothing coming back the other way, is more than one man should be carrying alone, and saying so is not a criticism of how he has done it. Tell a doctor plainly what the last eighteen months have been like, including the lying awake, rather than waiting to be asked. Ask about a counselor, who can hold what he is not allowed to repeat, which is a real and specific relief. Find one person, a pastor you trust or a friend outside the street, and put the weight of it into words on a regular basis.

And if the lying awake has begun going somewhere heavier than tiredness, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Handing something over is not a reduction in care for anybody. You are held exactly as much on the week you ask for help as on the week you carry it all, because Numbers 11:17 has God Himself arranging the sharing of a load, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that true in the body rather than only in principle.