8

Nehemiah isn’t a shy person, but he is a little hesitant to talk about his commitment. So he’s letting me write this chapter without him.

After trying threats, Nehemiah’s enemies tried tricks. “Come out to meet us,” they said. “We just want to talk.” Nehemiah knew that this was a trap.

And so, of course, he didn’t go. But as he responded, his focus wasn’t on the trap. His focus was on the task at hand.

“I am doing a great work and I cannot come down. Why should the work stop while I leave it and come down to you?”^[1]

Every time I read those words, I want to stand up in respect. Or fall down, heart convicted.

Say that out loud. “I am doing a great work.” Doesn’t that give you chills? Doesn’t that make you wish you could say that about what you are doing?

Nehemiah was rebuilding walls around “The City of God.” He had come 900 miles to do this work. He had prayed and planned and risked his life. He was completely committed to this project. It mattered.

Maybe you are doing something that matters, though you don’t see it that way. Maybe you are rebuilding the walls of protection for children whose lives have been wrecked. Maybe you are rebuilding your own life. Maybe you are just starting to build a foundation of following Jesus.

Go ahead. Say it again. “I am doing a great work.”

“I cannot come down.”

Nehemiah knew better than many of us that sticking to the work means not engaging in distractions. It means responding to critics by reminding them of the significance of the work we are doing and then going back to that work. It means using this same response (e.g. “I can’t come down”) over and over and over. (Four times for Nehemiah in this story).

When we understand that the work we are doing is great, then we are less likely to be involved in doing things that are merely good. That’s true even if those good things aren’t traps like the distractions Nehemiah was facing.

Except, the things around us could be traps.

I wonder if you are like me. We have a great work we want to do. Before we start, we check to see what’s happening in the world. We look at the clock and discover that five or fifteen or fifty minutes have gone by. We have read interesting things. We have learned much, perhaps. But we have made no progress on our “great work.” So we start again. When we come to a hard part, while we are thinking, we check to see what’s happening. Our fear of missing out (FOMO) is so intense that we miss out on the important work we could do.

You know what I mean?

Listen. Everyone who was working with Nehemiah, every person hauling bricks, every person standing guard, every person involved was part of this “great work.” Raising kids, doing your job well, rebuilding relationships or communities can all be “great works.”

When you believe the work you are called to is great, it’s easier to say “I can’t come down.”

“Why should the work stop?”

We hear all the time about not thinking of yourself too highly, of learning to be humble and being part of a team. I agree. But I also am learning much from Nehemiah about accepting the responsibility of taking responsibility. Though Nehemiah was not indispensable, he was the heartbeat of this project, this great work. That was his part of this project, to keep it happening.

• Nehemiah’s heart was the one broken about the broken walls of Jerusalem.
• Nehemiah risked his career to enlist the king’s help.
• Nehemiah traveled 900 miles by horse and foot.
• Nehemiah surveyed the damage himself.
• Nehemiah rallied the residents to start rebuilding these walls.
• Nehemiah planned work strategy and defensive strategy and morale strategy and prayer strategy.
• Nehemiah was everywhere during the project.

Being an effective leader–and being a follower of Jesus–means that you care enough about the work you are assigned to do that you don’t follow rabbit trails. While you are on duty, you are on duty. You never let yourself walk away while you are in the middle of a project where you hold the vision and you care about the outcome and you are passionately concerned about protecting the hands and hearts of the rest of the team. You accept the significance of your leadership because you understand that serving means owning up.

So what makes a work great? At this midpoint of Nehemiah’s story, that is a wonderful question.

Here are some suggestions:

• Something about it makes you weep. When Nehemiah hears about the condition of the walls of the city of God, it breaks his heart.
• It’s bigger than you. Hugely so. Rebuilding a city? Putting wells in every village in a country in Africa? No homeless children in your community? One particular person in your neighborhood knowing that they are listened to and loved?
• You have to take lots of small steps that don’t seem like they will get you anywhere. Each stone that Nehemiah’s crew moved seemed insignificant compared to a two-mile city wall. But each stone needed to be moved.
• Doing the work transforms you. Nehemiah was a seasoned leader when this was done.
• God calls you to do it. I know. This one can creep people out. But Nehemiah clearly believed that God was giving him this work. We don’t always understand the mechanics of God’s calling. And we have clear and tragic examples of people who attached the name of God to their own projects. But Nehemiah was clearly responding to the direction that God had given him.
• It matters enough that you ache when you can’t accomplish it quickly enough, and it’s big enough that you can’t accomplish it quickly enough. Every day working on a great project excites you, drains you and (some days) blesses you.
• It is not about you. This is tough. A great work is about others, not about you. So my weight loss is great, but it isn’t a great work.
• It takes so long that you can’t do it in a day, but the choices of each day matter in whether you can get it done. Every day you have to choose to take those steps we mentioned earlier. Every single day.
• You may not know anything about how to do the work. It may have nothing to do with your job. In fact, it may cause you to leave your job or may turn into a job.
• You cannot not do it.

Maybe you’ve been thinking about great work. Maybe you’ve been looking at the work in front of you and thinking, “It’s well and good to talk about Nehemiah. Of course his work was great. It was God’s work.”

That’s what we see now. That’s what we see through Nehemiah’s eyes. Other eyes would see differently.

If we were standing next to Nehemiah, about 30 miles from the Mediterranean looking east, we would have been reminded of the black-and-white photos we’ve seen of bombed cities. Walls in places, gaps in others. Whatever wood is left where gates once were is charred and worm-eaten. Beautiful houses have lost their back walls. The houses least touched, the walls least broken, are in the poorer parts of town, as if they weren’t worth a warrior’s notice.

“A fox would topple this wall” is what one skeptic said during the rebuilding process, reminding us that animals have been running this rubble for decades.^[2]

This “great work” of Nehemiah’s is a rubbish pile, 900 miles from the center of power, in the worthless wilderness between Greece and Persia. This “great work” is rebuilding the capital of a two-tribe nation, the last remnant of the twelve tribes of Israel. This “great work” was great only because Nehemiah believed it was. Nehemiah and God.

Nehemiah and God and the people. These were people who had been unwilling subjects of a distant-feeling King (God) until they ended up as unwilling subjects of a distant human king. Now that Nehemiah was here to give God-inspired hope, they were hopeful and energetic.

But there was still the reality of the rubble.

When you look at the work that God has in front of you, whether writing or children or ashes or dust, it may not appear great. But appearances deceive.