The Man Who Fixes Everybody Else's Roof

There is a ladder in the back of his truck and it has not come out of there since the second week of March.

He is good at this. That is how it started. He put a downpipe back on for the widow at the end in the spring of the year before last, and she told somebody, and somebody told somebody, and now there is a rotation he never agreed to and could not now describe to you but which he keeps perfectly in his head.

Saturday morning is the Andersons' fence. He has said he would look at a boiler on Sunday afternoon, which he does not really do, but the man asked.

His own gutters have been coming away from the fascia on the north side since last fall. He can see it from his kitchen window. He looks at it about four times a day.

And the thing he cannot work out how to say, to anybody, is that he does not resent one single person on that list. He likes them. He would do it again. He simply does not know how to stop, and there is no moment in the arrangement where stopping would be possible without it being an announcement.

You know that ladder. Maybe yours is a phone or a spreadsheet or a casserole dish. Some competence got noticed, and then it got scheduled, and nobody ever asked you.

Count what the ladder has cost, and count it before anything else

Nobody on that rotation has counted it, so let us.

It has cost him every Saturday since March, which is about twenty five of them, which is half a year of the single day in the week that was his.

It cost him his own house, and that is not a metaphor, it is a fascia board on the north side that has been getting worse since October and which he now feels a small drop about every time he does the dishes.

And it has cost him the thing that is hardest to name. He has become a service in that neighborhood. People are warm to him and they are glad of him, and not one of them has been in his kitchen and sat down, and he cannot see how that changed or when.

You have been useful for so long that nobody has thought to be a friend, and God has never once needed you for anything. Psalm 100:3 says it is He who made us and not we ourselves, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it in a man looking at his own gutters through a window. There is no ladder in that relationship.

Come apart, and who is doing the asking

There is one line built for a man with a rotation in his head.

And he said unto them, Come you yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.Mark 6:31

Read the situation, because it is his situation exactly. Many coming and going. Real need, genuine need, people who actually required something. And the men in that story were not slacking; they had just come back from doing the work and were reporting on it.

And it is Jesus who stops it. Not a friend, not a family member, not their own good sense. The one they were working for is the one who says come apart, and the same Spirit is the one who makes that a live word rather than a devotional thought about balance.

You have an invitation to come apart that came from the one you are working for, and it is not a rebuke. That is not a comfortable reading of a busy passage. The written word gives the interruption to Jesus rather than to the disciples, and the Spirit is the one who makes coming apart feel permitted rather than negligent.

And I want to be plain about this, because otherwise this article joins the rotation. Rest is not a job you are behind on. I am not telling you what your Saturday should look like, I am not asking you to have a conversation with the Andersons, and nobody on that list has been let down by a man who is tired.

Stopping once is not quitting

The fear under this is specific and it is not vanity.

It is that the arrangement is load bearing for other people. The widow at the end genuinely cannot get up a ladder. If he stops, she does not have a downpipe. And so any stopping feels like a decision about her rather than a decision about him, and he will not make a decision about her.

You are not the only provision in that street, and putting one Saturday down is not a decision about anybody but you. Philippians 4:19 says God supplies every need according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes supplies a live verb about a whole neighborhood rather than a promise about a man's own budget.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the tiredness has stopped being tiredness and gone somewhere flatter, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you go to anybody's house. That is not the arrangement failing. That is the shepherding, arriving through people with hands and telephone numbers, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.