The Follow Up Nobody Made

He built the whole thing. That is what makes this hard to talk about without sounding like a complaint.

Fourteen years ago a woman in that church had twins and nobody organized anything and she ate cereal for eleven days, and he heard about it and got annoyed in the way he gets annoyed, which is quietly and then with a spreadsheet.

Now there is a system. There is a form. There are three team leaders and a rotation and a rule that the first two weeks are covered by the immediate circle and weeks three to eight are covered by everybody else, because he worked out early that week six is when a family actually falls over.

He has run that list through about ninety households. Cancer, twins, a fire, four suicides, more funerals than he can count. He knows what to put in a dish so it freezes. He knows to leave it on the step and not knock.

His wife died in March.

And the system worked. It worked beautifully. For eight weeks there was food on his step in his own containers, and the team leaders did exactly what he had trained them to do, and week six was covered, and he was moved by it in a way that embarrassed him.

Then week nine came, because the system ends at week eight, because he built it to end at week eight.

That was five months ago.

And now, most evenings, he sits in his car in his own driveway for a while before he goes in. That is where he is at about half past eight, with the porch light on and the house dark behind it, and it is the same twenty minutes every night and he has never told a living soul about it.

The thing he cannot say, and it is the thing that would horrify every one of those ninety households, is this: he is the man who noticed that week six is when people fall over, and he is on nobody's list at all.

If that is a driveway anybody has sat in, stay here. There is a sentence in Hebrews that was written for exactly this seat.

A promise with no end date on it

Here it is, and I want you to hear the shape of it before the content.

I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

Never. There is no clause. There is no week eight.

That is the whole difference and it is worth sitting in your car with for a minute. Everything human has a rotation in it, and it has to, because human beings need to sleep and go to work and look after their own dead. The best system anybody ever built has an end date, and you know that better than most men alive, because you chose the end date yourself with a spreadsheet open.

This has no end date. And the Greek behind that sentence is unusually emphatic; it stacks negatives in a way English cannot quite carry, and what it comes out as is something like: not ever, no, not at all, will I leave you or abandon you.

You are held by something with no week nine in it, and you were held on every night in that driveway since the containers stopped. Hebrews 13:5 is the written word promising a presence with no rotation attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that car at half past eight the whole time.

And look who that promise was written to. Not to a hero. It is written in a passage about contentment and money, to ordinary tired believers who were being tempted to give up, and it is offered as the reason a person does not need to grip anything else. It is a promise for people at the end of their own system.

You have not fallen through anything, and you were never dependent on a rotation to be kept. Hebrews 13:5 puts the keeping on Him rather than on a team leader, and the Spirit of God does not hand a man off at week eight.

Nobody knew, and that is not the same as nobody cared

Now let me protect those ninety households, because you are going to be back in that building on Sunday and I will not have you carrying anything into it.

Here is what happened, and it is almost funny if it were not so costly. You trained an entire church to trust the system. That was the point. That was the achievement. Nobody in that congregation worries any more about whether somebody is being looked after, because there is a form and a rotation and a man who runs it.

So when the man who runs it needed something, every single person assumed the system had him.

They were right, for eight weeks. And then the system did what he designed it to do, and there was nobody outside the system watching, because he was the person outside the system watching.

That is not neglect. That is a design consequence, and the designer is the one it fell on.

Keep them all. Keep the team leaders, keep the woman who brought the thing with the noodles, keep every one of the ninety. And put down any idea that a church full of people decided you did not need anything.

Right now, as you read this, you are kept by one who has never once assumed somebody else had it covered, and you were never handed over to a rotation. Hebrews 13:5 has no end date in it anywhere, and His Spirit has been outside the system since March, which is where nobody else could be.

Being the one who serves does not exempt you

Here is the harder part, and I am going to say it as a pastor to a man who will not want to hear it.

There is a belief underneath the twenty minutes in the driveway, and it goes like this: I am the one who carries. Being carried is for other people. If I need something, I have become one of the cases.

That belief is the reason the phone stays in the cupholder, and it is not humility, and it is not strength, and it is definitely not in the Bible.

Paul, who is the last man on earth you would call needy, writes to a church about a man named Onesiphorus who found him and refreshed him and was not ashamed of his chain, and he asks God to bless that man's whole household for it. Paul wrote most of the New Testament and he needed somebody to come and sit with him in a prison, and he said so out loud, in writing, in a letter people would read forever.

There is no tier of Christian who does not get looked after. That category does not exist.

You are not disqualified from being carried by having carried, and you were never meant to be outside the thing you built. The written word has an apostle naming the man who refreshed him, and the Holy Spirit is not standing in that driveway waiting for you to be self-sufficient about it.