A mind to work

Nehemiah is up on the half-built wall with a trowel in his hand, the broken gates of Jerusalem still charred in the rubble below him, and a message arrives from the men who do not want the wall to rise. Come down, they say. Let us meet on the plain of Ono and talk this through. He knows exactly what it is. It is not a peace offering; it is a trap to get him off the work, to stop the building with a conversation. Four times they send it, and four times he sends the same reply back down the wall, an answer that has become a motto for every rebuilder since: I am doing a great work, so I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it to come to you? Around him the people build with a mind to work, a load in one hand and a weapon on the hip, half of them laboring while half stand guard. The mortar goes up course by course. This is reorientation in its working clothes. It is not only insight; it is construction, sweaty and opposed and stubbornly focused, a labor that refuses every summons to climb down off the wall.

Reorientation will ask more of you than understanding. At some point it requires actual rebuilding, the unglamorous daily labor of putting a life back together course by course, new habits laid where old ruins were, new structures raised on cleared ground. And the moment you start to build, the messages will come, urging you down off the wall. They rarely sound like enemies. They sound reasonable. An old comfort that wants you back. Someone else's agenda dressed up as your duty. A grievance that wants to be relitigated, a hundred conversations on the plain of Ono that would all, somehow, stop the work. Learn Nehemiah's line and keep it ready: I am doing a great work; I cannot come down. The summons may be repeated four times, forty times. The answer does not change. Guard the rebuilding with a kind of holy stubbornness. Keep one hand on the load and one on the sword, and keep a mind to work, because the wall does not rise for those who climb down to argue every time they are called.