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Thanks for asking me to tell you about Nehemiah.

This isn’t where I was going to start. I had a great essay prepared about Nehemiah’s planning process. I wanted to talk about his leadership. But something wasn’t quite right about it. So I was sitting in my office talking with Nehemiah.

I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I read and think and try to understand what he was doing. It’s a result of how I teach when I teach from the Bible. I want to see “Bible people” as real people in real contexts. Even if they actually were living about 445 BC.

And in the process of thinking, I started talking to Nehemiah. I asked, “Why did you go so over the top emotionally when you heard from your brother Hanani?”

Because Nehemiah had. Gone over the top that is. His brother came from Jerusalem to Susa, about 900 miles, about the distance from Fort Wayne, Indiana to Alva, Oklahoma (or Dallas to Chicago). When his brother told Nehemiah that Jerusalem was in ruins and the gates were burned, Nehemiah sat down and wept. Then he spent days mourning and fasting and praying.

“Jerusalem,” Nehemiah said to me. “He was talking about Jerusalem.”

“I know,” I said, “But weeping and fasting and praying and looking awful? The walls had been down for nearly a century and a half. This was not new news.”

He put down his coffee cup. Neither of us is used to him drinking coffee. Seeing this courtly leader holding a chipped coffee mug instead of a gold wine goblet is odd. And he doesn’t know you hold a mug to think.

“You need to understand how I grew up,” he said. “You know how you heard stories from your mom about how your great-grandfather left Sweden and left his wife and son for a decade while he went to Wisconsin to make a new life? You remember how she wanted you to have a sense of the sacrifice?”

I nodded.

“When I was three or four, sometimes in the evening my mother looked west. I thought she was looking at the sunset until one night I heard her humming. I listened. I heard her start singing:

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
There on the poplars we hung our harps,
for there our captors asked us for songs,
our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
How can we sing the songs of the Lord
while in a foreign land?^[1]

“It was so melancholy. As a little one I couldn’t handle the pain in her voice. I walked away.

“When I got older, she started to teach it to me. It’s what you call Psalm 137. And I understood why she waited. The end of it talks about Edom and Babylon. In one of those sections you never read, the song talks about tossing infants…never mind.

“And of course, this wasn’t about her own life, exactly. She had learned the song from her father who learned it from his father. But it was his father who had lived it. Who had watched the siege of Jerusalem. Who had watched the temple burn. Who had seen the infants killed.”

He stopped. I waited. I had not expected this. Nehemiah was a book to me. Something I would read five chapters of in a day while reading through the Bible in a year. But sitting across from me was a real person. With a history. With a story.

“Growing up, many of us sang the songs of exile. We listened to the stories of the prophets who warned the people of the danger of ignoring God, of becoming gods themselves. We knew the exile was a result of not paying attention to the warnings. And we learned the pilgrimage songs, the songs of ascent.^[2] Songs about the annual journeys to Jerusalem, to the city of David and the city of God. To the Temple. Even though no one knew exactly when we’d need them again, we learned them.

“And then the exile was over. We could go back.

“The first groups were hopeful. They were going to the homeland no one knew. A generation went. Work started on rebuilding. And then there was another wave. We had watched the Persians conquer the Babylonians. There were stories about starting and stopping, stories about the temple.

“Eventually, my brother went to Judah. I had a good job in the palace, but I was so proud of my little brother, so thrilled to have a connection. And we waited to hear about the great work, the restoration of the city.

“One day my brother showed up unexpectedly. But that’s how everyone showed up back then. Unannounced. I was so excited to hear the news of the rebuilding, of the homeland. Lots of my people were comfortable in Babylon, but those of us who cared about returning to our homeland were hopeful.

“And when I heard from Hanani that nothing had changed, I was devastated. The breath went out of me. Do you know what it is like to spend your whole life and your parents’ whole lives and your grandparents’ whole lives retelling stories of what went wrong and what would be made right, lamenting the downfall, praying for the return? And then to hear that the people who went back, who could do something, were in despair? That after two generations and more, the walls were still in ruins, the gates still gaping and charred?

“It was more than I could handle. The city was in ruins. Someone needed to decide to rebuild. And somehow, unlikely as it was, I knew it might be me. I knew that I was going to have to give my one and only life to do something. To make a change. To take everything that I knew and throw it into this.”

Nehemiah slowly slipped back into his chair. I realized that he had fallen on his knees while he was talking.

I sat still. I thought of my own life, of the stories I learned about things that matter.

He smiled. “I get carried away. Sorry.”

He leaned back in the chair and looked around my office. At the books. At the coffee mugs. At the pictures of family.

“You know, sometimes I wonder,” he said. “If I knew that it would take the rest of my life, that I would spend a decade and more at the edges of the empire, would I have started this work? If I had known that I would fear and work and argue and defend. That I would give up all that was here in Susa for all that wasn’t there in Jerusalem. That I would work all that time and still wonder whether anyone’s life was really different, would I have done it again?”

His eyes stopped wandering. He leaned forward and looked at me. He said, “If you had something that mattered that much, wouldn’t you start working on it, no matter what?”

I closed my eyes and leaned back in the chair. I was too emotional to answer. When I looked up, he was gone. But his question is still in my heart.

“If you had something that mattered that much, wouldn’t you start working on it, no matter what?”