Get Up And Eat, The Road Is Long

Wes pulled into the rest stop on the highway at about quarter to six and he was still sat there at twenty past seven.

He had not planned to stop. He is a careful driver and he runs his hours properly. What happened was that he came round a bend and there was a rest stop and he indicated without deciding to, and then he was parked, and then he was just sitting there with his hands in his lap looking at a hedge.

Nineteen weeks of a bad stretch. His mother in hospital twice, a job change that went sideways, a daughter in a situation that he is not allowed to fix and does not know how to stop trying to fix, and about four hours a night for most of it.

He is not a man who talks about being tired. He would tell you that plenty of people have it worse and he would be right and it would not be relevant.

His mate Kenny came past about half an hour in, on the same run, and saw the cab, and pulled in behind him.

Wes braced. Genuinely braced. Because what he expected was a version of the conversation he has been having with himself for nineteen weeks, which is: come on, sort yourself out, other people manage.

Kenny got up into the cab and did not say any of that. He handed over a plastic bag with a sausage roll in it and a bottle of something orange, and he sat in the passenger seat and talked about a roundabout on the eastbound for about eleven minutes.

Then he said, "Right," and got out.

That was it. That was the whole intervention.

Wes said afterwards that he ate the sausage roll and drank the orange stuff and then slept for forty minutes in a rest stop, which he never does, and that when he woke up he could think again, and that it was the first time in about a month that a thought had gone all the way from the beginning to the end.

You may be braced too. Whatever your version of the rest stop is, you have got a talking to lined up for yourself and you are half expecting God to deliver it. And nobody has shown you what happens in Scripture when a man runs himself into the ground.

What Happened To The Prophet Under The Tree

There is a man in 1 Kings who has just had the biggest day of his working life and who is, about a chapter later, lying under a tree in the desert asking to die.

That is the actual text. It is not softened anywhere.

And here is what God does about it, and it is worth reading slowly because everybody expects something else.

"And the angel of the LORD came again the second time, and touched him, and said, Arise and eat; because the journey is too great for thee."1 Kings 19:7

The second time. He had already been woken once, fed once, and let go back to sleep. This is the second round of food and sleep, and there is still not one word of correction anywhere in it.

Arise and eat, because the journey is too great for you.

You are being handled by Somebody whose first move toward exhaustion is food and sleep rather than a conversation. 1 Kings 19 gives a man two meals and two sleeps before a single question is asked, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a desert scene and parks it in a rest stop on a highway.

And notice the reason given. Because the journey is too great for thee. That is God agreeing with him. Not arguing. Not pointing out that he had just seen fire fall on a mountain and should therefore be feeling better about things. Agreeing that the road is more than the man has in him, and feeding him accordingly.

You have been told the truth about the size of your road rather than told to be equal to it. That is what the written word does with a person at the end of themselves, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that arrive as kindness rather than as an interesting detail about Elijah.

The Talking To Is Not Coming

Now the part that this whole article exists to say.

The correction you have lined up for yourself is not what is on offer here.

It comes later in that chapter, incidentally, sort of, in the quietest possible form, after the food and the sleep and a great deal of wind and fire that turn out not to be the point. But it does not come first, and it does not come to a man who has not eaten.

And whatever you are carrying, and however much of it you think is your own fault, that order holds. Food first. Rest first. The state of the body first.

That is not indulgence and it is not lowering a standard. A person who has not slept properly in nineteen weeks cannot be reasoned with, including by themselves, and God appears to know this better than we do.

You are not going to be dealt with before you are fed. It is written that as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities them that fear Him, which is a sentence about the register the whole thing is conducted in, and His Spirit is the one who has been in the passenger seat for the last hour and a half.

And say the guard, because this is where a kind thing could become a rule. Nothing on this page asks anything of you. No practice, no discipline, no schedule, no proportion of anything, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere. If you sit in that rest stop for another hour and do nothing at all, you are exactly as much His at twenty past eight, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this off the ground where standards grow.