The Job I Never Applied For

Nathan started the second job at nineteen and nobody has ever thanked him for it, because as far as anybody knows it does not exist.

The first job is the one people know about. He has had four of those over the years and he is good at what he does and he talks about it at tables like everybody else.

The second one started the winter his father's work went wrong. Nathan was nineteen and away, and he came home for a fortnight, and something happened in that fortnight that he could not have described at the time and can describe perfectly now.

He became the one who knows how much there is.

Nobody handed it to him. There was no conversation. Nobody in that family sat him down and said, from now on you carry this, and if you asked any of them today they would be genuinely shocked, and one of them would probably cry.

But he became the one who tracks it, in his head, all the time, for the whole family, and he has been doing it for twenty-six years.

He knows what everybody's situation roughly is. He knows which of his siblings is stretched this year without ever having been told. He does a kind of running estimate at every family gathering without being aware he is doing it, and when he goes home from one of those he is more tired than the day accounts for, and he has never once been able to say why.

He worked it out on a beach, sitting slightly apart from everybody, watching the game in the shallows, and what arrived was not a revelation. It was a job title. He thought: I have been doing this since I was nineteen.

Now I want to stay right here for a minute, because this is a wound and I am not going to hurry past a wound to get to a lift.

Nobody in that family did anything wrong. That is important, and it is the hardest part. There is no villain. Nobody exploited him and nobody leaned on him on purpose, and the thing he carries is not something anyone asked for.

It is worse than that, in a way. A weight somebody handed you can be handed back. This one was picked up in a fortnight by a nineteen year old who loved his father and did not want anybody frightened, and it has never been possible to put down because it has never been possible to name.

And it has never once been paid. Not in thanks, not in help, not in acknowledgement, because it is invisible, and invisible work does not get paid.

You have your own version. Something in your life has been running since you were young, and it started in a specific season, and you have never called it a job because nobody hired you.

Nobody is calling you a martyr. There is nothing self-pitying about you and I would not insult you with that.

But you have been working two, and only one of them has ever appeared on a payslip.

Paul says you did not receive the spirit of bondage again

There is a sentence in Romans that is almost always read as being about fear, and is actually about employment.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

The spirit of bondage. A slave's disposition, a servant's posture, the inward stance of somebody who is working to hold a position rather than living in a place that is already theirs.

He says you did not receive it. Not that you should resist it. That you did not receive it, which means that whatever has been operating in you since you were nineteen did not come from Him and was not issued by His household.

And now hear what is already true over you. You are not a servant in that family, you are a son in this one. That is not my encouragement: the written word says you received the Spirit of adoption, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself, not my paragraph, who is described as the one crying Abba in you, which means the crying is His work and not another duty of yours.

And you have not been holding your family together. He holds all things together, says the word, and He was doing it through every one of those twenty-six years, including the years you were watching the numbers at family gatherings and could not have told anybody why you were tired. The Spirit is the one who lets a man believe that without feeling that his love has been made redundant.

Nobody is telling you to stop caring

I want to be very plain, because this is where a message like this tells somebody to put down a weight in a way that would cost the people they love, and I will not do that.

Nobody here is telling you to stop looking out for your family. Do not go home and announce anything. Do not withdraw from anybody, and do not have the conversation tonight in the state you are in.

And nobody is telling you the carrying was wrong. It was love. A nineteen year old who takes something on so that a house full of people will not be frightened has done a good thing, and God saw it, and it is not undone by being named.

And nobody is telling you that having less would have spared you this. The second job is not about the amount. A family with plenty produces exactly the same job for exactly the same kind of young person, and the amount was never what made it heavy.

So hear what is not required. You do not have to keep it up to keep them safe. Nothing in Scripture makes anybody's household depend on one person's vigilance, and the Spirit of God has never once been short of ways to look after people who are loved by someone tired.

And there is a rest that remains. The word says exactly that, that it remains, still open, not expired by twenty-six years of not taking it, and the Spirit is entirely able to hand it to a man on a beach who has never once considered himself entitled to it.