Say Down

The first thing anybody is taught on a six man lift is one word.

Not how to bend. Not where to put your hands. The word.

You are carrying a hull, or a beam, or something heavy that has to go from one place to another with six people underneath it, and before anybody touches it the old man says the same thing he has said for forty years:

"On my count. And if anybody needs it down, you say DOWN, and we put it down. Nobody asks why. Nobody ever asks why."

And he means it. I have seen a man say it at the halfway point on a slipway with the tide coming in and everybody wanting to be finished, and every one of them went to their knees with it and set it on the ground and stood up and shook out their hands, and nobody said a single word about it, and forty seconds later we picked it up again.

The reason for the rule is not kindness. That is what young men do not understand at first.

The reason is that a man who does not say it drops it. And a dropped load does not injure the man who was struggling. It injures the two on the other side, who had no warning, and it damages the thing, and it takes a great deal longer than forty seconds to sort out.

Rangi worked on that shore for thirty-one years and never once said it.

He would tell you it was not pride. He would say he could always take it. And most of the time he could.

Until a morning in the November when he could not, and he did not say the word, and he went down at one end with a two hundred kilo hull, and a young man called Sef came off the far side and did his shoulder, and Rangi has never got over that. Not the hull. Sef.

He said to me afterward, sitting on the wall with his hands still shaking: "If I had said it, we would have lost forty seconds."

Now let me ask you.

When did you last tell anybody you were at your limit?

Not hinted at it. Not been visibly tired at somebody. Said it, in words, before the drop.

Somebody said it to Moses first

There is a scene in Exodus where a man is doing far too much, and it is not God who tells him. It is his father in law, who has come to visit and watched him for one day.

You will surely wear out, both yourself and these people who are with you, for the task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.Exodus 18:18

Read who is included in the wearing out: both yourself and these people who are with you.

Jethro does not present this as a matter of Moses looking after himself. He says the people standing around him will be worn out too, which is the six man lift exactly: the one who will not say the word does not only damage himself.

You cannot do it alone. Flat. No qualification. And this is said about the man who had gone up a mountain and come down with the commandments in his arms.

So hear this over you, sitting on the wall with your hands still shaking. You are permitted to say what you cannot carry, out loud, before anything drops, and saying it is not a failure of strength. That is written into the life of the strongest man in the Old Testament, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the Helper, which is a word about somebody coming alongside a load rather than watching a person carry it.

Now let me name what is actually stopping you, and I am going to be careful with it, because it is not a character flaw.

You have been carrying since you were young.

Somebody needed you to, and you did it, and you were good at it, and it worked, and after a while it stopped being a thing you did and became who you were. And every year since then, the amount you could take went up and the number of people who would notice if you set something down went down, and now you are thirty-one years in with a hull on your shoulder and no idea how to say a word that everybody else on the crew uses freely.

That is not pride. That is a habit that was once a virtue.

And here is the safety, and it is the whole of it: you are not the only thing holding this together.

God is. He is holding the family, the job, the people who lean on you, and He was holding them for the years before you arrived and He will be holding them at the exact moment you set something down and shake out your hands. The written word says He upholds all things by the word of His power, and if He is upholding all things then He is not relying on your shoulder, and never was.

Which means the forty seconds are affordable. That is the whole calculation you have been getting wrong.

Let me guard this in one direction before I finish.

Saying it does not mean walking away, and it does not mean announcing to a room that you have had enough of everybody. It is one word, to the people already under the load with you, before the drop.

Moses did not resign. He said yes to Jethro and delegated, and carried on for the rest of his life, and the difference is that after that day he was carrying an amount a man can carry.

There was a man five hundred years ago who worked himself into serious illness more than once and wrote, late in life, that he had learned to say plainly when he could do no more, and that he had come to see the refusal to say it not as strength but as a quiet form of unbelief, because it assumed the whole thing rested on him.