You Are Not the Roof

The same words at the top of every article on this site. This is not medicine. I am not a doctor or a nurse, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing here ever stands in for a clinic or a pharmacist. If the reason you cannot put this down has never been looked at by anybody qualified, that call is today, and it goes ahead of everything else.

Now. There is a posture you have been holding, and it is not physical, although your shoulders would disagree.

It is the posture of a man standing under something. Arms up. Weight on. And the thing above you is not one thing, it is the whole arrangement: the money, the people, the health of somebody you love, the thing nobody else knows about yet.

And you cannot put your arms down, because you genuinely believe that what is above you would come down.

That belief has never once been examined out loud, and it has been setting the shape of your entire adult life.

Somebody is named as the one holding it together

There is a sentence in Colossians that I would put in front of every man I know who cannot stop.

And he is before all things, and by him all things consist. (Colossians 1:17, King James Version)

By him all things consist. That word means held together. Not created and then left. Held, continuously, in the present tense, right now while you are reading this.

And the reach of it is total. All things. Not the important things. Not the spiritual things. The whole arrangement, including the specific bit you have been standing under with your arms up since about the year you got married.

You are standing under something that is already being held. Colossians 1:17 puts the holding together of everything in one set of hands and does it in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man take that as a fact about his own household rather than a general truth.

I want to be careful, because this is not a verse that says nothing matters or that a man should stop working. It says what the load is resting on, and the answer is not a set of shoulders in a truck in a yard.

You have been duplicating a job that has never once been vacant. The Spirit of God is the one who tells a man where the weight actually sits, and it is written that by him all things consist, said in the present tense about everything without exception.

What the posture is costing, and who else is paying

Let me say the practical half, because that is what will move a man like you.

Arms up is an expensive position. It costs energy continuously, and it costs it even when nothing is happening, and it costs it at night. A man in that posture is tired in a way that sleep does not fix, and then he concludes that he needs to hold tighter, which is the exact wrong response and the most natural one.

You are paying for a position that has never once been load bearing. Colossians 1:17 names somebody else as the one doing the consisting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends an expensive duplication.

And there is a second cost, and it lands on people. A man standing under the whole arrangement cannot be in the room with anybody. He is present, and he is also permanently calculating, and the people around him can feel it even though nobody could name it.

Your family does not need the roof held. They need the man to come and sit down.

You were never the structure, and no household has ever once wanted one. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a man out from under something and into a chair, and what is written puts the holding together of all things in hands that are not his.

The plain routing, and it goes ahead of the rest

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort, and it belongs first on an article like this.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and putting your arms down is not the answer to it. If the heavy thing today is in your own mind, and particularly if the weight above you has started to feel like something you want to be out from under permanently, 988 answers, and a real person picks up, and it is exactly what it exists for. And if the tiredness has never been looked at, ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today.

You are named in every one of those lines. Colossians 1:17 puts the man inside the all things rather than outside them as the one holding them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody count himself among the things being held.

I want to be direct about the middle one, because men skip it and I am not going to let it go past. If the thought has crossed your mind more than once, tell somebody today.

You have a number and a person and it has never once been for somebody else only. The Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man making a call he does not want to make, and what is written holds all things together without ever making one man responsible for that.