Holding the Family Together

His father died on a Wednesday and by the Saturday he was the one everybody looked at.

Nobody voted. There was no conversation about it. There was a room full of people needing decisions and he made the first three, and after that it was settled, and it has been two years.

He is the one who calls his mother every day. He is the one who managed the house, and then the sale of the house, and then the argument about the sale of the house, which went on for five months and which he handled without ever raising his voice. He is the one his younger sister calls at eleven at night. He is the one who knows about the money.

He is forty three. He was not the eldest. Nobody expected this, including him.

He is good at it, which is the trap. Every time he handles something well, the family is more certain that he is the one who handles things, and each successful handling makes the next one more inevitable.

What he has not said, not to his wife and not to one of them, is what he thought at the table at Christmas.

He looked down the table at eighteen people, all of them fine, all of them enjoying themselves, several of them enjoying themselves because of arrangements he had personally made, and he thought: if I stopped, this would come apart, and everybody here would be surprised.

He got up and got something from the kitchen and did not come back for a while.

The sentence, unsaid: everybody looks at me first and there is nobody above me.

You may know that table. Everybody fine, and you the only thing holding it.

A king said it and they kept it

There is a short prayer in the psalms written by a man who was, at the time, the strongest and most senior person in his entire nation.

From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.Psalm 61:2

Read what David is willing to put in writing. My heart is overwhelmed. Not was. Is. And then a request that assumes something he badly needs to be true, which is that there is a rock higher than he is.

He is the king. There is nobody above him in that country. Every dispute in the land ends at his table, the way every dispute in this family ends at a man of forty three, and he writes down that he needs somewhere higher to be taken to.

You are allowed to say the thing a king said out loud, and Psalm 61:2 has the most senior man in a nation admitting his heart is overwhelmed and asking to be led higher, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a prayer from a man with nobody above him and lands it on somebody at the head of a Christmas table.

There is a rock higher than he is

Consider the specific thing he asks for, because it is not what most people ask for when they are overwhelmed.

He does not ask for the load to be removed. He does not ask for the nation to need him less. He asks to be led to a rock that is higher than he is, which is a request for somewhere to stand rather than for a lighter day.

That distinction will matter to a man like this, because he is not asking to be relieved of his family. He does not want to stop being the one they call. What he needs is what David asks for, which is something above him.

You have somewhere higher than yourself to stand on, because the written word puts a rock above the most senior man in the country and lets him ask to be taken there, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a good image into an actual place.

And notice where he says he is when he prays it. From the end of the earth. He is not describing geography. He is describing how far out a person can be while still praying this, and the answer is as far out as it gets.

You are not too far out for that prayer, and Psalm 61 sets the crying from the end of the earth and still routes it to God, and the same Spirit who preserved that song is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

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

Two years of being the decision maker, the daily phone call, the money, the eleven at night call and the person who managed a house sale and a five month argument, at forty three, with nobody above him, is more than one man should be holding, and saying so is not a criticism of how he has held it. Tell a doctor plainly what the last two years have contained, in the same detail he would give about somebody else, rather than waiting to be asked. Ask a counselor, which is exactly the arrangement in which a man can say what he cannot say at that table. And tell his wife what he thought at Christmas, in those words, because she is the one person in the world who is not depending on him for a decision.

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

Saying it out loud is not the family coming apart. You are held exactly as much on the day you say it as on the two years you did not, because Psalm 61:2 has a king writing his own overwhelm into the national songbook, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in the body rather than only on paper.