He Gently Leads The Ones With Young

The conversation was meant kindly and that is why she cannot put it down.

A woman she respects, after a service, asking how she was doing spiritually. And she said the honest thing, which is that she is not doing anything spiritually, and that most days she gets to about nine at night and has nothing left for anybody including God.

And the woman said, warmly, with real care in it: I think this is a season where you have to be intentional. You have to fight for it.

She is thirty-six.

What is in her week: two under five, one of whom does not sleep through and has not for eleven months. Her mother, forty minutes away, since the fall in March. Three days at a job she cannot drop because they need the money. A husband who works away Monday to Thursday and is doing his best and is not here.

There is no margin. Not reduced margin. None. There is no half hour in her week that is not already spoken for, and the only reason she is reading this is that somebody fell asleep in the car and she has not turned the engine off.

And now, on top of all that, she is carrying an instruction. Be intentional. Fight for it. Which she has understood, correctly, to mean: the thing you have not got is available if you would put in more effort, and the reason you have not got it is the effort.

The clause about pace

There is a verse in Isaiah about how the shepherd moves, and the last clause of it is the one nobody quotes.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

And shall gently lead those that are with young.

That is a clause about pace, and it exists because a flock does not move at one speed. Some of it can travel and some of it cannot, and the ones who cannot are specifically the ones carrying something.

And notice what the shepherd does about that. He does not exhort the slow ones. He does not tell them to keep up, or be intentional about the walking, or fight for the pace. He changes how He leads.

The adjustment is entirely on His side. The ewe with young does not have to do anything differently at all; the whole flock's speed accommodates her, because that is what a shepherd is for.

You are the one that clause was written about, and the accommodation is His to make rather than yours. That is not me finding a soft verse for a hard week; Isaiah 40:11 puts the gentleness of the leading in the shepherd's hands specifically for the ones carrying, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it and lays it over a woman in a parked car with the engine running.

What was wrong with the advice

Now let me be fair to her, because she meant well and you know she did, and then let me say why it was wrong.

Be intentional is decent advice for a person with margin. Somebody with two spare evenings and no dependents can be told to fight for something and it is a real and useful word.

You have no margin. Which means the same advice, given to you, becomes something different: it becomes an instruction that cannot be obeyed, and an instruction that cannot be obeyed does only one thing. It produces guilt. That is its entire output in your life.

So a woman with two under five and a mother in decline has been handed a fresh source of guilt by somebody who loves her.

You have been given an instruction that could only produce guilt in your circumstances. The written word has the shepherd adjusting His pace for the ones carrying rather than exhorting them to keep up, and the Holy Spirit is not the author of the sentence you drove home with.

And I want to say plainly what this site says everywhere: the flatness you are describing is not sin. It is not distance from God, it is not a failure of intention, and it is certainly not something you could fix by trying. You are not spiritually dry. You are tired in a way that would flatten anybody, and there is nothing here to repent of.

You are not behind on anything and nothing is being required of you this week. Scripture makes the leading gentle for exactly the ones in your position, and the Holy Spirit has been walking at a woman's pace through eleven months of broken nights.