Somebody Has To Hold The Arms Up

He fills the little plastic doors on Sunday night. Monday through Sunday, left to right, morning row and evening row, and in eleven years he has never once gotten it wrong.

It takes him twenty minutes at the counter with the radio down low. Then the laundry goes in so it can come out before bed. Then he checks the ramp he built himself off the side door, because the third board has a screw that keeps backing out and he would rather find it than have somebody else find it the hard way. Then he sets the alarm for ten to five, because that is when the day starts if the day is going to work.

Nobody knows any of this. Not because it is a secret. Because it is a Tuesday, and because the whole design of it is that if he does it right, nothing happens. No fall. No missed dose. No crisis at the hospital at four in the morning. A perfectly ordinary week, which is the entire product, and there is nothing to show anybody at the end of it.

You know the arithmetic that starts around year six. You are not bitter about it. You would not trade the job and you would not hand it to anybody else. You have simply started to suspect that whatever it is God is building among His people, you are not in it. Other people teach. Other people go places. Other people are able to say what they do.

And what you thought, standing at that counter with the little doors open in front of you, was that if you disappeared tomorrow, nobody in the wider world would be short of anything at all.

Read what God bothered to write down

There is a battle in Exodus that everybody remembers wrong.

The way it gets told, Moses stands on the hill with his arms up and Israel prevails, and when his arms come down Amalek prevails, and the lesson is about persistence in prayer. Fine as far as it goes. Now go and read the actual verse, and count how many of its words are spent on Moses.

Almost none. The verse is about the equipment and the two men.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.Exodus 17:12

A stone. Somebody had to go and find a stone. One man on the left. One man on the right. The going down of the sun, which is a way of saying hours, which is a way of saying that at some point both of those men's shoulders were on fire and neither of them let go.

You are already doing the work, and it has been the work the whole time. Exodus 17:12 spends its words on the two men holding rather than on the army in the valley, and the Holy Spirit is the one who decided what went into the record and what did not.

Here is the pit, and nearly every quiet person falls into it eventually. You have been grading yourself on the visible economy. The one where a contribution counts when somebody can see it happen, name it afterward, and thank you for it. That economy is real enough and it is not the one God keeps books in, and running your life against the wrong ledger will make an eleven year faithfulness look like nothing at all.

You have a part among God's people and it is not decorative. That detail was written into the record on purpose, and His Spirit does not keep a second set of books for the people nobody names.

The soldiers are unnamed. The holders are not.

Turn this one over slowly, because it is the whole point.

There was an army in that valley. Joshua chose the men himself. They fought all day and some of them did not come back, and the text does not give us one single name from among them. Not one. It gives us Joshua at the top and after that the valley goes silent.

And up on the hill, where nothing dramatic was happening, where two men were doing a job that would look ridiculous described out loud, the record stops and writes them down. Aaron. Hur. One on the one side and the other on the other side.

That is God's own editing. He had the whole day to choose from and He kept the arms.

You were given something the rest of them need. The word names the holders, and the Spirit is the strength inside the holding, which is why your shoulders are still up after eleven years of a job that has no applause built into it.

Now let me be careful, because there is a thing people do at this point that I am not going to do. I am not about to hand you a role. Nothing on this page is going to suggest you take something on, sign up for anything, or find a way to serve, because you are already carrying a household and the last thing you need from a stranger is another item.

You already have the job. That is the correction. Not that you should find one.

And notice the size of what those men actually did. They held. That is all. No strategy, no eloquence, no strength beyond what it takes to keep two arms in the air, and that is a strength that shrinks over a long day and shrank over theirs. Nobody in that account had much left by sundown. The holding still held.

So the ground is this, and I will state it plainly. You are among God's people, and needed among them, because God builds His people as a body with no spare parts in it, and because He personally kept the record of the ones who held. That is the ground. Not output. Not visibility. Not what you could put in an update if anybody asked you for one.

It is already recorded, and the ledger you have been reading is simply the wrong ledger. Scripture kept the detail that nobody else would have thought to keep, and the Holy Spirit is why it is still legible to a man at a kitchen counter thousands of years later.