Somebody With Authority Said It Is Too Heavy

I want to talk to the person whose week is made of other people's emergencies.

Not appointments. Emergencies. The friend who is going through it and calls at nine at night. The relative whose situation has been ongoing for eleven months and has no visible end. The neighbor whose husband is ill. The person at church that everybody has quietly agreed is yours.

Look at this week. Most of what is on it is not an event, it is a person who is not doing well, and you are the arrangement that keeps them going.

And here is what I know about a week shaped like that, because I have watched it in a lot of people and in a couple of mirrors. Nobody has ever told you to stop. Not once. Everybody has told you that you are wonderful, which is true and is also completely useless, because being told you are wonderful is what keeps a person going for another year.

What you have never had is somebody with standing looking at the whole load and saying, plainly, that it is too much.

I want to do that. But first I want to show you that it has already been done, in Scripture, to a man far more capable than either of us.

His father in law watched him for one day

Moses is judging Israel. People come to him with disputes from morning until evening, and he handles them, all of them, one man for a whole nation.

His father in law comes to visit, watches this happen for a single day, and says this.

Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee: for this thing is too heavy for thee; thou art not able to perform it thyself alone. (Exodus 18:18)

Notice what is not in that sentence.

There is no accusation. Jethro does not tell Moses he is prideful, or that he likes being needed, or that he has a problem with control. Those are the things a modern reader expects, and none of them are there. He does not question the work. Judging the people was real work that genuinely needed doing.

He makes one observation, and it is about physics rather than character. This is too heavy. You are not able. Not you are unwilling, not you are wrong to try. Not able.

You are not able to carry this, and that has never once been a statement about your character. Exodus 18:18 has a man told he cannot perform it alone with no accusation attached anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hear that as care rather than as a verdict.

The other thing in that verse is the part almost nobody quotes. Thou wilt surely wear away, both thou, and this people that is with thee.

Both. Him and them. The people he was serving were also being worn out by the arrangement, because a nation waiting all day in a line for one exhausted man is not being served well. The load was not only costing Moses. It was costing the very people it existed to help.

You have been told the truth about a cost you thought only landed on you, and it was written down before you were born. The passage names both parties wearing away. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that land without it turning into one more thing to feel bad about.

What he did not say

Jethro's advice is the practical part, and it is worth reading closely because of what he does not recommend.

He does not tell Moses to stop judging. He does not tell him to rest more, or to set better limits, or to look after himself. Those would all be advice aimed at Moses, and Moses is not the problem in the design.

And let them judge the people at all seasons: and it shall be, that every great matter they shall bring unto thee, but every small matter they shall judge. (Exodus 18:22)

He changes the structure. Other people take the small matters. Moses keeps the great ones.

That is not a smaller life. It is a life in which the thing only he could do actually gets done, instead of being one of four hundred items in a line behind two neighbors arguing about a goat.

The reason this matters for your week is that you have almost certainly been solving the wrong problem. You have been trying to become the sort of person who can carry eleven crises, and looking for the technique that would make that possible. There is no technique. Jethro did not offer one, and he had the wisdom to see the whole thing in a day.

You have been looking for a way to carry it, and the answer was never a way to carry it. Exodus 18 changes the arrangement rather than the man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can show a person the difference between a load to be borne and a load to be shared.

Somebody has to be allowed to say it

Now, here is the hard part, and it is why I opened the way I did.

Moses listened. That is one line in the chapter and it is the whole hinge of it. He hearkened to the voice of his father in law, and did all that he had said. The most authoritative man in Israel took correction about his workload from a visiting relative.

I think most people in your position have nobody in that seat. Not because nobody loves them, but because the people around them are all beneficiaries. It is very hard to tell somebody they are carrying too much when part of what they are carrying is you.

So if there is nobody, let it be this. I am a pastor and I am telling you plainly that what is on your week is too heavy, that you are not able to perform it alone, and that saying so is not a criticism of you but a description of it.

You are carrying something no single person was built to carry, and the sentence saying so has been in Scripture for three thousand years. Exodus 18:18 puts it in four words, thou art not able. The Holy Spirit is the one who lets that arrive as permission rather than as failure.