Always The One Who Brings It Up

Wendell has been in about eleven groups in thirty years, and in every one of them he was the one who brought it up, and he has never once been relieved.

He wants that counted properly, because it sounds like a complaint and it is closer to a report.

Church groups, work things, a committee, two lots of neighbors, a group of men who fish. Eleven, near enough. And in every one, at some point, somebody has to be the person who says the thing that everybody has been walking around, and it has never once been anybody else.

He is not proud of that and he does not think it makes him better than anybody. He would swap. He has thought, on more than one drive home, that he would genuinely like to sit in a room where somebody else does it and he gets to be the one who nods.

That has not happened in thirty years.

And the tiredness of it is not what you would expect. It is not the tiredness of the conversations, which he mostly enjoys. It is a slower thing: the tiredness of always being the one whose turn it is, in a rotation with one name on it.

He said something to his son about it last autumn, in a yard, and then wished he had not, because it came out sounding sorry for itself and that is not how he meant it.

What he actually meant was: I am not sure I can keep being the only one.

You have your own version. There is a role you have played in every group you have ever been in, and nobody appointed you to it, and nobody has ever taken a turn.

Nobody here is going to tell you to keep going and try harder. That would be a stupid thing to say to a tired man.

But there is a sentence in Corinthians about what has actually been carrying this, and it is not you.

The verb is about pressure from outside, not effort from inside

There is a line in 2 Corinthians where Paul explains why he keeps going, and the word he chooses is a strange one.

For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead.2 Corinthians 5:14

Constraineth.

It is a pressing word. It means to hold together, to press in on from both sides, the way banks press a river into a channel. It is used elsewhere of a crowd hemming somebody in and of a person gripped by a fever.

And notice the subject of the verb. Not Paul. Not his conviction, not his discipline, not his sense of duty. The love of Christ is the thing doing the pressing, and he is the object of the sentence rather than its engine.

That is a very different account of thirty years than the one Wendell has been carrying.

And you have not been running this on your own supply. That is not my encouragement: the written word puts the love of Christ in the subject position and the person in the object position, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man in a yard who has just heard himself sound sorry for himself.

And the pressure you feel is not manufactured by you. The word describes it as something that presses in rather than something a person generates, and the Spirit is the one who makes that distinction real, which matters enormously to somebody who has been assuming for three decades that the whole thing depended on his own willingness.

What the tiredness actually is

Here is the part that Wendell needed, and it is not about capacity.

He is not tired from speaking. He has said so and he is right: he mostly enjoys those conversations and he is good at them and they cost him less than people assume.

He is tired from the rotation.

Specifically: from the low continuous scanning that happens in every room he enters, which asks whether anybody else is going to, and which has returned the same answer eleven times out of eleven for thirty years. That scanning runs whether or not he speaks. It runs at coffee mornings and at funerals and in a boat. It never switches off, because it has never once been given a reason to.

That is where the fatigue lives, and no amount of enjoying the conversations touches it, which is why he has never been able to explain the tiredness to anybody, including himself.

And you are not responsible for the room. The word says every man shall bear his own burden, and it is written two verses after an instruction to bear one another's burdens, which means Scripture itself holds both and does not make one person the load-bearer for a whole group, and the Spirit is the one who lets a man put down a weight he was never assigned.

And the outcomes were never yours. The word says Paul planted and Apollos watered but God gave the increase, and the increase is His verb, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine handover to somebody who has been quietly holding himself accountable for eleven groups.

Nobody is handing you a quota

I want to be plain, because a message like this often ends with somebody being told to keep at it, or worse, given a target.

There is no number here. Nothing on this site will ever tell you how many conversations you should be having, and if you find a page that does, close it, because that is a machine and you are not one.

And nobody is telling you to stop, either. You have not been doing something wrong for thirty years.

What is being offered is the thing that would actually change a drive home: knowing that the pressing is not coming from you, and that the scanning is not a duty.

And you are allowed to enter a room without checking. Nothing in Scripture assigns anybody permanent responsibility for whether a subject comes up in a group, and the Spirit of God has never once required somebody to be the standing conscience of eleven separate sets of people.