Eleven Days of Not Holding It

Aoife got flu in the February and found out something she had spent nine years avoiding.

She is the fixed point. Everybody has one, in a family or a group of friends or a street, and she is theirs. She remembers the birthdays. She is the one who notices when somebody has gone quiet and sends the message that says are you all right, actually. She books the table. She keeps the group going that would otherwise have stopped meeting in 2019.

She would tell you she does not mind. That is true and it is not the whole thing.

The whole thing is that underneath nine years of it, she has a belief she has never once said out loud, and the belief is this: if I stop, it stops.

Not arrogance. She is not proud of it and she does not think she is important. It is closer to dread. She has a picture, more or less permanently at the edge of her mind, of what happens to all of them if she takes her hands off.

Then in the February she got properly ill. Not a cold. Eleven days on the sofa, three of which she does not remember well.

And she could not do a single thing.

No birthdays. No messages. No booking. No noticing. She lay there under a blanket and watched the whole structure she has been holding up for nine years carry on without her.

Here is what happened, and she has thought about it every day since, because it was not one thing and it was not what she expected.

Some of it stopped. That is true and it hurt. Two people she has checked in on for years did not check in on her, and she noticed that, and it took some sitting with.

Some of it carried on perfectly well without her, which is a strange thing to find restful and painful at the same time.

And two people she would never have predicted turned up. One of them came round on day four with soup and a bag of things from the shop she had not asked for and would not have thought to ask for, and stayed forty minutes, and did not once ask her how everybody else was.

She said afterward, to her sister, on the phone, in the tone of somebody handing over something heavy:

"I have been the one holding it since 2016. And it turns out I am not what was holding it."

Now let me ask you what you believe would happen.

Because if you are the fixed point somewhere, you have a picture too. Not a thought, exactly. A picture, at the edge, of the thing coming apart if you take your hands off it.

The holding together is a job, and it is taken

Paul writes a sentence about Christ in a letter to a church he had never visited, and it is the plainest description of who is doing the holding.

He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.Colossians 1:17

In Him all things hold together. The word underneath it is the one you would use for something being held in a state of coherence: not created and then left, but continuously kept from flying apart.

All things. Not the important ones. Not the spiritual ones. All of them, which is a category that includes a group that would otherwise have stopped meeting in 2019.

So hear this said over you, on the sofa under a blanket on day four. You are not what is holding your people together, and the nine years in which you believed you were have not been true for one day of them. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a fact about Christ holding all things and lets a person actually put something down, which is a completely different work from admitting they should.

Now let me guard this carefully, because it could be misread as an instruction to withdraw, and it is not.

Nothing here tells you to stop loving people.

Remember the birthdays. Send the message that says are you all right, actually, because it is a good message and it has probably done more than you know. Book the table. Scripture is full of people who carried each other, and there is a direct command to bear one another's burdens.

What is being removed is not the caring. It is the belief that the structure rests on you.

And those two things have got welded together over nine years, and the weld is why it is exhausting. A person who books a table because she loves her friends can enjoy the evening. A person who books a table because she believes the friendship group ceases to exist otherwise cannot, and she has not, and that is the difference between nine years of company and nine years of duty wearing company's coat.

Now let me sit with the hard half, because I am not going to skip it.

Some of it did stop.

Two people did not check in. That is real and this article is not going to explain it away or tell you what it means about them, because I do not know, and neither do you, and neither does anybody who offers you a theory.

But look at what it is not. It is not the collapse you had a picture of. Eleven days with your hands entirely off, and the thing you have dreaded for nine years did not happen. Some of it thinned. Some of it held. Two people arrived from a direction you were not watching.

That is what a structure looks like when it is being held by somebody other than you.

The written word says He is before all things and in Him all things hold together, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that land in a person's body rather than in their theology, and He tends to do it on a sofa rather than in a good week.

There was a movement five hundred years ago whose people were convinced that God governs whether or not anybody competent is available. They were not passive about it. They built schools, argued in courts and organized more than almost anybody in their century. But they were formed by the fact that their movement survived the deaths of every single one of its leaders, repeatedly, and they took that as evidence about who was holding it.

Not one of them was the fixed point either.