Being The Room Everyone Sits In

I had stopped measuring the last couple weeks, honestly, in days. There was an incident at work I was resolving from my kitchen, laptop propped against the fruit bowl, while my neighbor was knocking at the front door about something I have since forgotten. Someone I love had been asking for one-on-one time and I managed to give it with my earbuds in the best I could in the meanwhile. Colin needed the things Colin needs, and my friends were going through their own storms. My phone was erupting, the house was a disaster, and all of this was stacked on top of eight hours at the hospital with an hour of highway on either end of it.

I wore the same shirt and the same pair of scrubs the entire week. In fact I think I washed my hair once. No one noticed.

What struck me, though, was the composition of the demand

Everyone waiting for me was waiting. Not working, not occupied with anything urgent, not even engaging with anything I have sent them on a personal level. Filling time. Scrolling, watching something, puttering, until I became available. They were queued up outside a door, and I was the room. And no one actually noticed me.

I did not go to the gym once. I did not open a single game or pick up anything I was reading. I somehow have to make time at my job to fulfill my teaching responsibilities on top of everything else I need to be doing. And the hours I did manage to carve out went to sitting with people while they set their burdens down in front of me.

Now I want to say this: I am not exactly complaining even though may already sound that way.

My gift is encouragement. I know that about myself the way I know my own handwriting. I like building people up; I am good at it; something in me comes alive when someone leaves a conversation steadier than they entered it. At Bible school they used to tell us to be Jesus with skin on, which was incredibly cliche but it was a necessary goal for the mature Christian. A love that runs against the grain of how the world handles people.

So the burdens arriving at my door are not an imposition on the assignment. They are the assignment… or at least they look like it from where I stand.

But when every person in your life brings you their dragons, and the dragons are genuine and the people are dear, at what point is there room left for your own inner life? And how do you make that room without shoving anyone out of it?

Boundaries, people say. I know about boundaries. These aren’t boundary problems. These aren’t takers, and I want to be precise about that distinction because it changes the context. Nobody in my week was extracting. They were in need, and they did not know the running total. It is not that they don’t care what I cost. It is that the cost is invisible from where they’re sitting.

The passage I keep going back to on this is Exodus 18, and I found it pretty useful when it comes to the burnout I felt from this week.

Moses is judging the people. They stand around him from morning until evening, and his father-in-law Jethro watches this for one full day before saying something. “What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone” (18:17-18).

The Hebrew behind “wear yourselves out” is nabol tibbol, doubled for emphasis, and the root means “to wither or fade the way a leaf does.” Not collapse or even break. Wither, which is slower and harder to notice from inside.

Two things to notice about Jethro’s counsel:

1. The first is that he tells Moses the people will wither too, not only Moses. An overextended person is not only damaging herself; she is becoming a bottleneck for everyone standing in the line.
2. The second is that Jethro’s remedy isn’t for Moses to start declining cases. Appoint capable men over thousands and hundreds and fifties and tens, let them handle the small matters, bring the hard ones to you.

The cure was distribution, not refusal. And Moses had to go find the other judges himself, which means the fix cost him something before it relieved him.

There’s a pair of verses in Galatians that seem to contradict each other until you look at the words underneath.

“Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2). Then, three verses later, “each will have to bear his own load” (6:5).

The Greek is key here. In verse 2 the word is baros, a crushing weight, something that flattens a person who tries to carry it alone. In verse 5 it’s phortion, which was used for a ship’s cargo or a soldier’s pack: the load properly assigned to you, sized for you, yours to carry.

So Paul is not being inconsistent…. he’s drawing a line between the weight that requires other people and the weight that belongs to you.

What I have been doing lately is accepting a great many people’s baros while insisting on carrying my own phortion alone, as though mine never crossed the threshold into the first category. I have decided, without examining the decision, that my things are always the second kind.

The two ways I know to get this wrong are both available to me:

There’s the grasping version, where I go fishing for care. Where I say something heavy to see whether anyone picks it up, or leave a sentence hanging to find out if someone will ask the follow-up question. I have done this. It is not attractive and it does not work, because a question you had to angle for does not satisfy the thing that made you angle.

Then there’s the withdrawing version, which is more my habit. I stop offering anything. I take my inner life somewhere nobody can reach it (this blog, mostly) and let the people in my life have the version of me that is only helpful. That one is more comfortable and it is worse, because it guarantees the outcome I claim to be grieving. Nobody can fail to hold something you never handed them.

What I notice about both is that they’re maneuvers. Neither one involves saying anything to anyone.

Which brings me to the thing I find most instructive in Paul.

At the end of 2 Timothy, facing a cell and probably an execution, he writes: “Do your best to come to me soon.” Then: “Luke alone is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is very useful to me for ministry.” Then, with no transition at all, “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, also the books, and above all the parchments” (4:9-13).

He is cold and he wants his coat. He is lonely and he says the name of the person he wants. He is bored or hungry to study and he asks for his books.

There is no hint dropped in any of it. No testing whether Timothy will offer first. He states the need, names the item, and asks.

And earlier, writing to Corinth, he says something I find almost startling from an apostle: “But God, who comforts the downcast, comforted us by the coming of Titus” (2 Corinthians 7:6). The comfort of God arrived in the form of a man walking through a door. Paul does not apologize for having needed that too.

I think that’s the thing I have been missing. Not that I need boundaries, and not that I need to want less. That I have never once said what I need, to a specific person, with a specific thing named, and then let them do whatever they were going to do with it without pleading or petition.

I should say this too: Being the room everyone sits in is a position. There is something in it I have not renounced. If I’m the one holding everyone, then I’m essential, and essential is safer than known. Nobody leaves the person they depend on. And a woman who is always the steady one never has to find out what happens when she isn’t.

So some portion of my exhaustion is what I built. I did not construct it on purpose, but I’ve maintained it, and I’ve called the maintenance a spiritual gift when at least part of it is insurance.

Barnabas comes to mind here.

His name was Joseph; the apostles renamed him Son of Encouragement, which was apparently how thoroughly he was identified with it (Acts 4:36). He is my patron in this, I suppose. But I notice he traveled with Paul. He wasn’t a solitary reservoir. He was in a pair, and when the pair split over Mark he immediately took Mark with him instead (Acts 15:39). The man never worked alone. Whatever else that arrangement was, it meant somebody was always there who had seen him tired.

What I still don’t know what to do with is the flowery language.

People say they want to be a safe place for me too. They say they want to make sure there’s room for me. I believe they mean it in the moment they say it. And then that’s roughly where it stops, and the next conversation is theirs again, and I am back to holding.

I have concluded, provisionally, that most of them are not lying or trying to be deceitful. They are stating an intention that exceeds their present capacity, which is a thing all of us do. Peter meant it when he said he’d go to prison and to death, and he meant it at the moment he said it (Luke 22:33).

So I’ve stopped reading the gap as either. What I have not worked out is what to do with it practically though. Whether to let the sentence be pleasant and expect nothing. Whether to answer it the next time with an actual request, some specific and small thing, and see what happens. Whether the asking would be a burden I’m placing on people already carrying plenty. Or just keep coming back to this blog where I can really talk about what I’m experiencing.

Of course, that last hesitation is the withdrawing reflex again.

It makes me wonder if the room I keep looking for was never going to be one big enough for all of it anyway.

Maybe I’m longing for something that simply can’t exist.

Maybe it’s several small rooms held by several different people, none of whom can take the whole thing, the way Jethro split the line into thousands and hundreds and fifties and tens.

I do know that I have been withering by degrees, and that it’s slow enough that I have to be told. Jethro had to watch a full day before he said anything, and Moses had no idea until someone from outside the system looked at it and named what he saw.

Maybe all I have is this blog. And maybe that’s okay.