He Sat Down And Wept First

He is a man who solves things and the family knows it, and it has been useful to them for about thirty years.

Somebody's car. Somebody's paperwork. The apartment above his cousin's that took four months and eleven phone calls and got sorted in the end because he does not let go of a thing once he has hold of it. If you want a problem handled you bring it to him and he handles it, and he likes that about himself, and he should.

So when the thing with his brother got to where it is now, he did what he does. He got a notebook. He wrote out the situation in three parts. He listed what he could control and what he could not. He decided he would pray about it properly, seriously, with structure, and he went looking for how you do that, because if there is a right method he will learn the method.

And every place he looked pointed him at Nehemiah. Everybody points at Nehemiah. Great organizer. Great planner. The man who rebuilt a wall in a hostile city with a schedule and a work roster and half the crew holding weapons.

So he read Nehemiah. He read chapter one.

And the first thing that man does, before any of it, is sit down on the ground and cry.

If you came here for a method, come and sit down at the table. Nobody is going to take the notebook away from you.

Read what the great planner did first

We have made Nehemiah into a management book, and there is real material in there for that, and it has cost us the first chapter almost entirely.

Here is what happens. He is a long way from home. Men arrive with news about the city and the news is bad, and he asks them a direct question and they give him a direct answer.

And it came to pass, when I heard these words, that I sat down and wept, and mourned certain days, and fasted, and prayed before the God of heaven.Nehemiah 1:4

Sat down. Wept. Mourned. And then, in that same sentence and after all of that, fasted and prayed.

The order is the teaching. Everything this man is famous for, the gates and the timber and the wall going up, comes later and comes out of this. What is in front of us here is not a strategy session. It is a man on a floor with his hands over his face.

And notice, he did not schedule the grief. It arrived, and he sat down in it instead of standing up and organizing it, which is what a competent man does instinctively and what he did not do.

You are allowed to arrive without a structure, and you were never required to bring one. Nehemiah 1:4 is where that sits, in the first thing the most organized man in the Old Testament did about the worst news of his life, and the same Spirit who kept that verse before all the famous ones is the one who lets a capable man stop building for a minute.

What the notebook is actually for

Let me be careful here, because I am not about to tell a competent man that his competence is a spiritual problem. It is not, and that particular sermon has done damage in families like his.

The notebook is good. Three parts is good. Knowing what you control and what you do not is genuinely wise and most people never learn it. Nehemiah gets to the planning, and the planning is superb, and the wall goes up.

The question is only what the notebook is being used for right now. Because there is a way of organizing a grief that is not management at all. It is distance. It puts the thing at arm's length where it can be worked on instead of felt, and a man can keep it there for years and call it responsibility.

His brother is not a project. That is the sentence he has not been able to write in the notebook, in three parts or otherwise.

You have somewhere to put the part that will not fit into a plan, and it is already prepared for you. He promised it, in the invitation to cast your care on Him because He cares for you (1 Peter 5:7), and His Spirit does not treat a man's tears as a delay in the process.

The part that outranks the teaching

Before anything else goes further, this outranks all of it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length here, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one on this page ever.

And notice what Nehemiah's chapter does not give you either. No length. No method. No instructions to copy. The text tells you what was in him, not what he consumed, and every attempt to turn it into a procedure has had to add the procedure from somewhere else.

Privacy, too, is about audience and never about hiding. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is ordinary courtesy in a family. None of it fails anything.

You are not one step behind anybody because of what your body will not allow. Scripture settled that long before you got here, where God receives according to what a person actually has (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been rationed by a medical note.

If today is heavier than a page can carry, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.