5

“Help,” I whispered.

Nehemiah was sitting in my office. Just sitting. In my mind, I was running through a long list of projects in front of me. I was feeling a huge backlog.

Finally, I turned my chair and looked at him.

“Help,” I said again.

“What makes you think I can help you?” he replied. He lifted his coffee mug and sipped, looking right at me the whole time.

“You had a huge project. You got it done fast. And you weren’t any more prepared to lead than I am.”

He stiffened.

I started babbling. “I mean, you had a great job and a great reputation with the king, but you weren’t in the first chair. You weren’t a king, you weren’t a general, you weren’t a manager.”

He set his mug down very deliberately. “I think we need to talk about my preparation sometime soon,” he said. “But that won’t help you right now. You are feeling swamped. And you need some insight for the middle of the project.”

“Exactly,” I said.

“Okay. Read chapter 3 of my memoir. It’s the list of names.”

“I’d rather not,” I said. I had looked at that list while trying to read through the book. It was one of several lists, all of which I skimmed.

He looked at me and said quietly, “Do you want my help or not?”

I stopped. “Okay. I’ll read it. But give me a summary.”

He leaned back in the chair, a teacher ready to talk for a while. “I’ll give you five lessons that will help you lead in your great work. But they will only make sense if you read.”

I nodded.

He held up a finger. “Lesson number one: If you read closely, chapter three is a circle–not a list.”

He knew he’d lost me already. This didn’t sound like a leadership lesson or a practical principle.

“It’s not,” he said, reading my thoughts. “The only way you can learn from the book is to learn to how to read the book. You have always read this chapter like a book chapter, and it looked like a list of names. If you look closely, this isn’t a line, it’s a circle. This is a panorama shot. It starts at the Sheep Gate and ends at the Sheep Gate. Instead of sitting and reading this, stand up and point to the parts of the circle that represent who is building where.”

I waited.

“No, really, stand up. Read the names, look around the circle.”

So I did. And he was right.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “When I read it that way, it looks like the goldsmiths and merchants are on either side of the Sheep Gate. And so are the priests.”^[1]

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s where the temple was. That’s where the trade happened. If you keep looking at the lists, you might see more patterns. But let’s move on.

“Lesson two: Most of the people rebuilding the wall didn’t come with me. They were on location and had been for years.”

“How does that help me in the middle of my project list?” I was feeling a little selfish. After all, I have the deadlines. Nehemiah is dead.

Nehemiah answered, “What if all around you are people who are anxious to work on parts of the project of rebuilding the same wall you are interested in? What if they’ve just felt stuck? They are already here. They just need help.”

“But that’s the problem,” I said. “I need help. They might need help, but I’m who matters at the moment.”

Nehemiah looked at me. “What kind of help do you need?”

“The city is ruined and the gates are burned.”

He smiled, “That was my problem. What’s yours?”

It took me a little while, but I figured out a list of three or four of the biggest projects facing me right now. I told him the highlights.

“What kind of help can you give?” he asked.

I just stared at him. “What do you mean?”

He was patient. “What do you know how to do, whether it applies to this project or not?”

“According to the ‘StrengthsFinder’, my strengths are strategic, ideation, empathy, intellection, and connectedness.”^[2]

“Does everyone have those strengths? Do other people have the same strengths?”

I thought about it. The whole point of strengths thinking is that we need each other to accomplish the tasks that are bigger than us.

Nehemiah picked up my thoughts: “And there is no way I could rebuild the wall by myself, every rock, every gate. So do what you know how to do. That’s what I did. I knew how to drill down and identify the problem, identify a plan, and tell the people that they wouldn’t be disgraced any more. I gave them hope. It’s what leaders do. Go back and read my conversation with the people when I first got to Jerusalem. I said ‘Come, let us rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace.’^[3] They felt disgraced. That’s why I told them it would stop.

“Rather than focusing on the whole list, start looking for the things on the list that you can do and consider how those things might help the people already on the ground, the people who are aware of the problem and just need help to start.

“One last thing. In my case, they needed to know that God hadn’t forgotten them. You might want to include that in what you are saying to the people around you. They might need to be reminded that God is involved.”

But something bothered me. “How was God’s involvement so clear to you?”

He smiled. “Remember that four-month prayer? Remember the king story? The fact that I was standing in Jerusalem at all was pretty clear evidence to me that God was involved. That’s why ‘I also told them about the gracious hand of my God on me and what the king had said to me.’”^[4]

“Okay. I get it. Different people have different gifts and leaders have to lead. But why did you have to tell us by making us read this list?”

He walked upstairs to the kitchen and turned on the stove. It was time to switch to tea.

As he walked back into the office he said, “Lesson three: Every worker’s story needs to be told.”

“As we already said, you think that chapter 3 is a chapter. For me, it was the chart from the wall of the construction trailer, helping us know who was doing what. After the wall was built, I rolled it up and saved it. I wanted to remember that time. And when I wrote out my memoir, I put it here because it was an important list to keep.

“All of those people were people. All of those people worked. All of us were real people who had real stories about our work. There were people from inside and outside, there were people from every class of our culture. The religious people worked. The nobles worked–well, some of them. Families worked together. Neighborhoods. This was an amazing project. Eliashib. The men of Jericho who came down. Zaccur. Shallum’s daughters.^[5]”

I was losing him. He was so excited about the people. Name after name, and with every name it was clear that he knew these people and that he cared. It was clear that he had led them with his heart. No wonder he kept the list.

The teakettle was whistling. I coughed. He stopped. He went upstairs. When he came back, he was calmer.

I said, “What was that about the nobles?”

“You noticed. Good. That’s Lesson four: Not everyone is going to work the same way.

“I know you.” he said. “You want to give everyone a chance. But at some point, you need to be clear that some people help, some people help particularly well, and some people don’t help at all. Pointing that out helps everyone.

“The nobles of Tekoa were particularly rude.^[6] They were unwilling to set aside their arrogance and follow competent builders. It’s part of that point about different gifts. When you have a construction manager, a leader should see that and follow that. The leaders from Tekoa didn’t.”

I raised my hand. “You know, I was looking on a map for Tekoa. I noticed that it was southeast of the city. Is it possible that the rulers were willing to work on the section of the wall nearest them but that they didn’t want to travel all the way across to the northwest side of the city? Because I noticed that the men of Tekoa worked in both places.”

Nehemiah shrugged. “They were good workers. We assigned the best people to the places where we needed skill. I’m not interested in explaining why the nobles resisted our directions, it’s enough to know that they did.” Nehemiah smiled. “On the other hand, Baruch, Zabbia’s son, did a great job. And it was worth noting.^[7]

“And one last note here. When you look at the map of the city, some people and teams completed long sections. Others did short sections. That’s because in some places the wall was damaged a little. In other places the wall was destroyed. Some people have the capacity to do lots of work. Others have the capacity to do a little. Let them do what they can do. And celebrate it.”

He looked at me, looked at his tea, and said, “I need to finish up. Here’s Lesson five: Most people work hardest on what’s closest to their heart.

“Some people can work anywhere. But sometimes people work best when they are repairing the part of the wall closest to home, closest to family. When we were facing the threat of attack, I moved people to be near their families, close to their homes. It gave them an added motivation to work hard.”

“But isn’t that being too easy on people?” I asked. It seemed to me that we should all work as hard as we can on everything.

“For me, for my brothers, for the soldiers that the king sent with me, you are correct,” Nehemiah said. “It’s our job. But these people weren’t builders, they weren’t soldiers, they weren’t leaders. They were merchants and farmers, some from outside the walls, some from inside.

“Making them commute too far, making them care too much, isn’t fair. So show people how the work relates to their family, and let them work close to home. It still counts. It still builds the wall.”

I raised my hand. “Some of your workers were a little sloppy.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s been some work looking for your wall. And the archaeologists have found a section of wall that looks a little uneven, a little amateurish. It looks like some people who were merchants and farmers were working on the wall.”^[8]

Nehemiah shrugged. “What did you expect? I made it up?”

I went back to his point. “You mean helping someone lead their own family matters? Working on only part of a larger project matters? Working without a sense of the bigger vision matters?”

“Absolutely,” Nehemiah said. “God gave me the big vision. My job was to let people work on their parts and connect that to the big vision. And help you do the same. I hope that helps.”

And he was gone.

I was left to summarize. And I think he said:

Give people permission to do what they know how to do. Give them hope in knowing that God cares about what they do. Give them a personal connection. Give them attention. Give them room to fail. And to succeed.