- Notes from Nathan
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- Exodus 20:10
…but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.
Inconvenient truth: you're going to disappoint people.
I wish I’d given myself permission to embrace that reality sooner in life. There seem to be two drastically different versions of letting people down - one being much lighter than the other:
One disappoints people’s expectation for us to be the solution to their soul’s deeper hunger. They haven't yet detected it, but it’s there. This disappointment is born out of only offering one answer to others: “Yes.” We have a tendency to need to be needed, which makes us prone to advice-giving in the places prayer would be much more effective.
Or we’re going to disappoint people in our refusal to participate in the notion that we ourselves can fulfill what ails them. This refusal doesn’t run on someone else’s agenda. It can sit in tension, assured that God is perfectly capable of drawing others to himself and his solutions - and he may or may not use us to do so.
Only the latter option lives without the burden we weren’t created to carry. It frees us from the weight of trying to be a pseudo-savior, instead opting to point people to depend on their actual Savior.