Four Men and a Roof

They have been friends since they were nineteen and he is exhausted.

Not by the friendship. By the project the friendship turned into somewhere around 2016, when his friend went through the divorce and stopped coming to anything and started saying, mildly, without hostility, that he did not think there was anybody there.

Since then this man has done everything.

He has argued well and he has argued badly. He has sent things. He has invited him to nine events, of which his friend attended two, politely. He has prayed in a way he would describe as constant and would more accurately describe as anxious.

And he has begun, in the last year, to notice something he does not like in himself, which is that he is slightly less pleased to see his friend than he used to be, because every meeting is now an opportunity that may or may not be taken.

Here is the sentence he has never said out loud.

He has been trying to produce the response, and it has quietly turned a friend into a piece of work that is going badly.

Read exactly what the four did

There is a scene in Mark that everybody knows, and the detail worth counting is what the friends actually accomplished.

And when they could not come nigh unto him for the press, they uncovered the roof where he was: and when they had broken it up, they let down the bed wherein the sick of the palsy lay.Mark 2:4

They let down the bed.

That is the whole of their contribution and it is enormous. They carried, they climbed, they broke up somebody's roof, and they lowered him into the room.

And then they stop. Read the rest of the passage and the four do nothing else at all. They do not speak for him. They do not explain him. They do not extract a response from him. Everything after the lowering is between Jesus and the man on the bed, and the friends are not mentioned again except in one clause about their faith.

They did the carrying. They did not do the healing, and nobody expected them to.

Your job was the carrying rather than the response, and Mark 2:4 has the four stopping at the point where the bed touches the floor. That is what the word actually records them doing, not a limit I am imposing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who does the rest of it in a room a friend cannot enter.

Two jobs, and one of them is not yours

Now the plain thing, and it is the reason for the tiredness.

You've been doing both jobs. The carrying, which is genuinely yours and which you've done magnificently for nine years, and the converting, which was never assigned to you and cannot be done by a human being at all.

That second job has no completion condition, which is why it is exhausting. You can carry a man to a room and know it is done. You cannot ever finish producing a response in somebody, because responses are not produced from outside, and every conversation ends with the job still open.

And it has cost something. It is why you are slightly less glad to see him. A friend you are working on stops being simply a friend, and he can feel it, and it is almost certainly one of the reasons he says no to things.

And nothing about nine years of trying has ever made you a bad friend. Scripture assigns the four the carrying and gives them no responsibility for the answer, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to do a work that belongs to Him.

Carry him and say nothing

Here is the practical piece, and the second half is the hard half.

Do one act of carrying this week that asks nothing back.

Turn up. Drive him somewhere. Sit with him about the thing he is actually worried about, which is his daughter and not his soul. Bring food. Fix the thing in his kitchen he has mentioned twice.

And do not mention God.

Not because God is embarrassing, and not as a technique that softens him up for a later approach, because that is the same job wearing different clothes and he will smell it. Do it because carrying is a complete act in itself, and because he has not experienced one of those from you in about four years.

You are able to carry him without converting him, and the converting was never in your hands. Mark 2:5 puts the four at the roof and the rest of it between the Man and the bed, and the Holy Spirit is the One who works in a room where nobody else is standing.