6

Nehemiah suggested we go out to the garage. When I opened the door, it didn’t look at all like our garage, the garage always on the other side of that door. I mean, it was the same workbench my dad had made, the cold chisel that was my grandfather’s; but somehow it looked different. More like a construction site.

“Take a seat,” Nehemiah said, pointing to a limestone block. “I want to talk to you about conflict. You aren’t very good at it.”

He’s right. I over-react, over-internalize. As I’ve been reading through his book, I’ve noticed over and over how Nehemiah seems to respond rather than react. I wanted to talk to him about it. Turned out, he wanted to talk to me.

And he wasn’t much for conversation this morning. “I want to talk you through some of the resistance I’ve faced, the conflict I dealt with. Maybe you can learn something.”

I got as comfortable as I could on a rock.

“You remember that I had a community meeting three days after I got to the city? It’s when I said, ‘The walls are ruined and the gates are burned. We are going to rebuild the walls.'”^[1]

I smiled. Always reminding. “I remember.”

“Shortly after that meeting, Sanballat, Tobiah, and Gershon found me. Sanballat was from a nearby town to the northwest. He was the biggest talker among the three. He had a hot temper. Gershon lived south. He was the muscle. Tobiah was an Ammonite, from the east, across the Jordan. He was … challenging. I’m not ready to talk about him yet. He was the most dangerous of the three because of his strong connections to the leadership. He was political.^[2]

“They mocked us, accusing us of rebellion. It wasn’t a serious threat, just an attempt to find out how serious I was.

“I let them know how serious I was. I told them that this was about God, that we were his servants, and that they had no right to be in this spiritual place.”

Nehemiah dipped a stick in some pitch and wrote on the wall. I looked up the Aramaic. It said “In the face of verbal challenge, respond with simple truth.”^[3]

He continued. “A few days later, after we started working, they moved to a new level. Now that we were making real progress, we heard that they were starting to get nervous. They realized that I was serious about rebuilding these walls. It made Sanballat mad. So he started fussing to his cronies when they sat around the campfires.

“I knew that I could wait. The bluster was just that. To do anything would only waste resources and distract the crews. So instead of responding, I let everyone keep working. I did, however, talk to God.

‘The tables are turned, God. We are doing your work this time, not ignoring you. So do to them what was done to us when we disobeyed you. Let them be hauled away to captivity. Let them have justice in your sight.’^[4]

“I know it sounds rough, but I decided to trust God to work.” He grabbed his stick again. “In the face of insults, pray.”^[5]

He refilled his mug. I realized that there was a coffee pot on this construction site. I got a mug, too. It tasted like it had been setting on the burner for centuries.

“Our adversaries kept getting madder. They started to make plans to attack us. But we needed to keep rebuilding the walls. Responding to the taunting and plotting wasn’t worth stopping to fight. So this time I did two things. I prayed. And I posted a guard. In case they actually, accidentally, acted.”

He wrote the third lesson on the wall: “In the face of threats, pray and post a guard.”^[6]

Nehemiah walked across the stony ground and looked out across the city. I hadn’t realized that we were on a hill, outside Jerusalem. Or at least that’s what it looked like.

Staring at the city, he started talking again.

“The next time I had to deal with the boys, the problem was more serious. You may not have realized that I was listening closely to all the chatter. There was a structure to the way reports came to me. At this point, a month into the project, I was getting three streams of information.

“From the leaders who were working closely with the people, we started hearing that the adrenaline was wearing off.^[7] They’d been working hard for several weeks, harder than they had ever worked in their lives. I knew that when you are leading people, the time in the middle is rough. They don’t have the excitement of starting. They don’t have the passion of seeing the end in sight. They are tired and the piles of rubble still seem huge.

“Then we started hearing from our enemies again.^[8] This time, they were talking about being able to come through gaps in the wall and attack us. They had all the advantage. They knew the city. There were no gates. Their plans made sense.

“We had heard all this before, but this time it was a little more serious. The people who lived out in the villages could see that the plans were more detailed. Sanballat, Tobiah, and Gershon were practicing. They were setting up camp. When people came to work each day, we got report after report giving us warnings.^[9]

“So this time, we were facing a combination of worn-out workers and a credible threat. I decided that we needed to be more proactive. I looked at the progress we had made. Because some of the wall had been damaged less, the work had gone faster. But the places where there had been attacks in the past, those places where the rubble was worst, the work was slower. If you remember back to the list of all the people clustered in small areas, they were working in these areas. I moved people so that they were with their families; they were by the part of the wall that protected them most.

“After I made these arrangements of people, I walked around the city to see how we were doing. And then I got the leadership together. It was time for a speech. It was time for a simple speech.

1. Don’t be afraid of them.
2. You are working for God.
3. When you fight, fight for the people you love.

“This was a life and death turning point. At those moments people need spiritual truth and they need personal connection.”

I interrupted. “And it worked. They backed off. You did it.”

Nehemiah shook his head. “What we all did is give God credit for frustrating it. It wasn’t my skill. If I hadn’t been aware of our people, if we hadn’t had people from our side who heard about the plans, if our enemies had been more about strategy and less about bluster, they could have taken us.”

Nehemiah stood silent, watching the history as if he could feel the threat. I picked up his stick. I think I understood the lesson: “In the face of an opponent’s mobilizing, implement a clear plan, which includes meaningful action, leadership strategy and reminding the people of the purpose.”^[10]

He looked at what I had written.

“That’s good. A little long, but that’s what we did. And it worked. But after that scare, it was clear that we needed a strong defensive presence. God had never given me the freedom to go on the offense. This work wasn’t about defeating them, it was about rebuilding us. So we kept rebuilding. But now I divided my people into two groups. One group kept working. The other stood guard. The people who were working were on guard as well. We had them carry swords when they were carrying lumber. On one hand, it slowed people down. On the other, everyone was way more focused. They were clearly engaged in the work. They looked for the shortest distances to carry materials, to help each other. They watched each others’ backs. They weren’t tempted to sit, resting in the valley. Everyone was alert and engaged.

“And my men and my brother and I did the best we could to let everyone know that we were aware. We were the first ones on the job. We were the last ones to bed. We had coffee ready when the crew got up. If anyone wondered whether the leaders cared, they only had to listen for the scrape of our swords on the rocks by the latrine.”

“So what’s the last lesson?” he asked.

“Try this,” I said. “For long-term protection, lay out a clear defense that is sustainable. It gives the people something at their back so they can go about the work.”^[11]

“That works,” Nehemiah said. “Now go back home.”

“But was that the end of the challenges? I thought they kept harassing you.”

“They did,” he said. “But I’m tired and so are you. Learn these lessons about active resistance and I’ll tell you about the sneaky kind sometime later. But next time we talk, I want to talk about a more challenging kind of resistance.”

I walked back through the door into our family room. When I looked over my shoulder to ask if he wanted more coffee, he was gone. And the shelves with piles of my life were back.