Not Alone

01 · Other duties as assigned

Does your job description, or maybe just your life description, end with four words: "other duties as assigned"? Pastors joke about that line. It's at the very bottom of the job description, and it ends up taking more of your time than anything above it.

I started in ministry in 2012 as the youth pastor at Williams Lake Church of the Nazarene, over in Waterford. I was fresh out of college, so I knew pretty much everything I'd ever need to know. Within the first week I realized I really didn't know anything. And that line really was written at the bottom of my job description.

On paper I was the youth pastor: Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, some Fridays or Saturdays, and teens in my house all the time. I also helped with the music for a second service in the gym, which we set up and tore down every single Sunday. If the daycare needed something, I was on staff, and I lived right behind the church. Every spring there was the big Easter musical, The Victor. Yours truly played Jesus for five or six years. That's where I got my God complex. (Just kidding.) Then add the teenager who calls at midnight because he just needs somebody to pray with him.

Then came 2015. In the spring, the family I would later marry into lost the grandmother who held them all together, and I tried to carry as much of it for them as I could. A few months later I was sitting in a hospital beside my dad through a frightening emergency. And on top of all of it, this was my year to be up for ordination. In the Church of the Nazarene you can be licensed as a pastor one year at a time, but ordination is the whole church saying that it trusts you, and that this is for life.

All of it was pulling on me, and I snapped. I stopped believing in the God I would get up and talk to my teens about. That filled me with guilt, because in my heart I thought I was lying to those kids. I felt alone. I felt scared. I'd put all my eggs in this basket. I was angry at God. I felt trapped. And on the outside I just kept up the front.

So let me ask you: who are you carrying? Maybe you're caring for somebody in your family, and that is a draining job. Maybe it's a kid, young or grown, who's in trouble. Maybe you're the one the family calls first. Every time.

One of my biggest problems in life is my favorite go-to phrase: "Never mind, I'll just take care of it myself." Anybody have that phrase? It's easier that way, right? Some of what you carry is real. Somebody handed it to you, and it's heavy. But some of it, if we're honest, we just picked up ourselves. And that's exactly where Moses is.

02 · Words God never said

Israel is about a year out of Egypt. They've just left Mount Sinai, where God met them and gave them his instructions, and three days back into the desert, the complaining starts. God has been feeding them every morning with manna, and now they want meat. They're remembering the fish back in Egypt. Moses can hear it from every tent. And this is what he says to God:

Why have you treated your servant so badly? And why haven't I found favor in your eyes, for you have placed the burden of all these people on me? Did I conceive all these people? Did I give birth to them, that you would say to me, 'Carry them at the breast, as a nurse carries an unweaned child,' to the fertile land that you promised their ancestors?
(Numbers 11:11–12)

It's a powerful sentence. But something in it is off. Moses is putting words in God's mouth that God never said. Go back through Exodus: God tells Moses to lead the people. God never tells him to carry a whole nation in his arms like a baby. That picture is Moses' own.²

Moses took the job God gave him and kept adding to it. Other duties as assigned. Except these weren't assigned by God. Moses assigned them to himself.³

Almost forty years later, at the end of the wilderness, Deuteronomy puts it plainly. There Moses tells the people that "the Lord your God has carried you just as a parent carries a child" (Deuteronomy 1:31). They were never Moses' babies. God was carrying them the whole time.

I know where "I'll just do it myself" comes from. I feel like we were taught it: if you want it done right, do it yourself. Don't let somebody else mess it up. So we pick it all up, so nothing falls apart. And then we end up where Moses ends up in verse 15:

If you're going to treat me like this, please kill me. If I've found favor in your eyes, then don't let me endure this wretched situation.
(Numbers 11:15)

This is Moses. One of the greatest prophets Israel ever had. He has seen God's very presence, and he says this right to God's face. I don't know about you, but I've prayed things so close to that: the real pain, feeling alone, feeling beyond help.

If that's where you are, the pain is real. You are not the only one. And you are not beyond help. Find someone you trust and tell them the truth about what you're carrying. If you're part of our church, I'm always here.

Because look at what God does next. As I said on Sunday: "God doesn't lecture him. He doesn't correct him." He doesn't tell Moses to have more faith. "No, he answers."

03 · Word for word

Moses prayed, "I can't bear this people on my own." God's answer ends, "so that you won't bear it alone." He answers him word for word.

And it's more than a decision to delegate. Delegating is good, but the voice creeps right back in: it isn't going the way you wanted, so carry it again yourself. God wanted something more for Moses than a better way to hand off tasks. He never meant for him to travel through it by himself.

Notice who God picks, too: seventy "whom you know" as elders, leaders Moses already recognized. I think there's something in that for us. Researchers put people in a brain scanner and told them a shock might be coming.⁴ When someone they knew and trusted held their hand, the brain's stress response calmed down. When a stranger held their hand, it didn't. God made us to walk through hard things with people we know.

Back to my story. That October, as part of the ordination process, I went to a ministry assessment weekend, still lost. There were two mentors in my group, and I decided to be honest. I told them everything. Instead of telling me that maybe ordination wasn't for me right now, they listened, and then they told me about their own times of burnout. They prayed over me. That weekend was the start of a lot of healing.

Then in January came my ordination interview: fifteen or twenty people in a room. I was honest again. Unfortunately, it did not go well. They decided to pass me on to the next year, and nobody in the room talked about how to walk with me in the meantime. I was broken all over again. I held anger toward that group for a while. I'll be honest: I'm not sure all of it is gone.

But one pastor in that room said, "Hold on." He told them they couldn't just leave me floundering; they had to work with me. And the room said to him, "Why don't you do it?" He said, "Yeah, I definitely will do it." He met with me every single month. When he couldn't meet in person, he called to check on me. He helped carry me, and he helped heal me.

2016 turned into a beautiful year. I was healing spiritually, figuring out who I am with God, and I married my wife that year. When that interview went the way it did, she had some righteous anger on my behalf. She stood up for me and fought for me, and she still does to this day. Now I meet every month with a group of small-church pastors in our district. We pray for each other, we encourage each other, and we cry with each other when things get hard.

That's what God did in Numbers 11. He doesn't just send help to Moses from the background. He puts his Spirit right there in the people around him, and they become God's presence for Moses.

And here's the part I can't get over. When the Old Testament was translated into Greek, there was a rare word for what those seventy elders would do for Moses. Paul uses that same word for the Holy Spirit, in the passage I prayed over the room before the sermon. Our own Wesleyan commentary points this out.⁵

In the same way, the Spirit comes to help our weakness. We don't know what we should pray, but the Spirit himself pleads our case with unexpressed groans.
(Romans 8:26)

The help Moses got from seventy, the Spirit gives you. Not only people around you, but God himself, taking hold of the load with you.

The weight you're under may be one God never handed you.

And the one he did hand you, you were never meant to carry alone.

04 · "I don't have 70"

Maybe you're thinking: must be nice, Moses. Seventy people show up to help you out. I don't have seventy, believe me. Maybe you look around and wonder who's really there.

Look at one little verse that comes right after:

Two men had remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the second named Medad, and the spirit rested on them. They were among those registered, but they hadn't gone out to the tent, so they prophesied in the camp.
(Numbers 11:26)

The others went out to the tent. These two stayed back in the camp, and the Spirit rested on them anyway. The help God sends is often closer than we realize: sitting right there in the camp, somebody we could easily overlook. Whether you're in a seat at church or reading this at home, you are not alone. God is working in the people all around you, whether you've noticed it or not.

Sometimes, just like in my story, you're honest and you get burned. It's so easy to focus on the burning. It was for me, even while that pastor was reaching out to me. Sometimes we have to step back, look at what is here, and say: I'm not alone.

Over the past seven and a half years, the people of this church have shown me they are so good at this. I want us to be a place where you can share the struggles and the worries and the pains, and not be judged or kicked out. Can you imagine if a pastor could feel safe enough to say what I felt in 2015: "Guys, I don't know if I believe"?

Some days we cry out, "God, why have you put all this stuff on me?" And then we walk into church on a Sunday morning, look around, and realize: God's here. As I said on Sunday: "Maybe we become answers to prayer that we, we thought only God could answer. Well, guess what? He is, just through us."