I Am The Staff And The Referee

There are two jobs and nobody has ever named either one.

The first is visible. Carrying, fetching, cooking, driving, clearing. Everybody can see that one and one or two of them have thanked you for it over the years.

The second one has no name, and it is the one that empties you.

You are watching the room. All day. You know which two must not end up in a corner together. You know the subject that must not come up before people have eaten and the different subject that must not come up after. You know the exact moment somebody's voice changes, and you can be across the room and starting a different conversation about something harmless before anybody else has noticed anything at all.

You have been doing that for years and you are extremely good at it, and there is not one person in that house who knows it is happening.

That is the job that costs you. The carrying is just carrying. The watching is a continuous state of low alert for eleven hours, and it is why you get in the car at the end and cannot speak.

Let me say the plain thing before anything else. Nobody appointed you to that. There was no conversation. It happened by degrees, because you noticed things earlier than other people and could not stand to watch a thing go wrong, and after a few years of that it became the arrangement.

And they stayed up his hands

There is a scene about a man holding something up and it is usually preached about persistence, and the actual detail of it is about staffing.

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. (Exodus 17:12, King James Version)

Look at how practical it is. A stone to sit on. One man on each side. Nobody in that scene says be stronger, and nobody says have more faith about it, and Moses is not asked to hold on a little longer.

What happens is that two other people take an arm each, and the reason given for it is simply that his hands were heavy.

That is a whole doctrine of load in two sentences. When a thing is too much for one pair of arms, the answer in Scripture is arms, plural, and a place to sit.

You have hands that have gone heavy after eleven hours, and it is written into Exodus 17:12 that the answer to that was two men and a stone rather than an instruction. The written word solves it with logistics, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that practical answer available to a man who has only ever been offered encouragement.

And notice the second thing, which is the one nobody preaches.

You were never the only one able to do this, and Scripture names two other men by name in the middle of the story. Exodus 17:12 records Aaron and Hur as part of how it was held rather than as spectators, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man who has quietly concluded that he is the only one paying attention.

Two jobs, one of them unassigned

Now let me be exact, because the exactness is the useful part.

Of your two jobs, one was assigned and one was assumed.

The carrying was assigned. Somebody asked, or it was obviously yours, or it fell to you in a way everybody understood. There is a shared awareness that you do it.

The watching was assumed. You took it on privately, because you saw something coming that nobody else saw, and you moved, and it worked, and then you did it again. Nobody knows you do it. Nobody has ever asked you to. And because nobody knows, nobody can relieve you of it, so it runs every hour that you are in that building.

You have been holding an unassigned job that nobody can relieve you of, and the written word puts two named people under the arms of a man whose hands went heavy. Exodus 17:12 makes the load visible and then shares it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names an unassigned job for a man who never noticed taking it.

And here is the part I want you to look at hardest. The watching mostly does not work.

It works in the moment. You do genuinely head things off. But the pattern in that family has not changed in eleven years, which means the whole enormous effort has been holding a line rather than moving one, and holding a line is a job with no end and nothing to show for it.

You have been holding a line rather than winning anything, and Scripture never once assigns one man permanent responsibility for a whole room's temper. Exodus 17:12 shares the weight the moment it is too heavy, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference between what a man is responsible for and what he is merely capable of.

Put one of them down

So here is the assignment, and it is not both jobs and it is not forever.

Name which of the two jobs is being put down, and say it out loud once.

For almost every man in your position it is the second one. Not the carrying, which is real and which you would do again. The watching.

Say it plainly, out loud, in a room by yourself: I am not the referee this year.

You are able to put down a job nobody ever gave you, and it has never once required you to stop noticing what you notice. Exodus 17:12 has a man's arms held up by other people rather than by better effort, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man saying a short sentence to an empty room.

And I want to be precise about what putting it down means, because you will otherwise turn it into a new and harder job.

It does not mean you stop seeing it. You will see it. Your eyes are trained and they are not going to untrain in a couple of weeks of trying.

It means you stop moving. You see the voice change, and you notice that you saw it, and you stay put. Somebody else may handle it. It may go slightly wrong. A thing may be said that would not have been said if you had crossed the room.

That is the actual cost and I am not going to hide it from you. The day may be one degree worse. And you may be in it.

You are trading one degree of the day for being in it, and it has never once been your job to guarantee that nothing goes wrong. The written word puts the holding in more than one pair of hands, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries a room that a man has finally stopped carrying alone.