I Will Hand These People To Somebody Else

Somebody will be sent and you will not choose them.

That is the plain fact and you have known it for years without looking at it directly, and it came into focus about three months ago for no particular reason.

You have nineteen people. Four of them have been with you more than a decade. Two of them came to you at nineteen and could not look a customer in the eye and now run shifts.

And at some point there will be a Monday, and a person you have never met will walk in, and everything about how those nineteen people are handled will change.

Here is the specific thing that has been keeping you awake, and it is not about you.

They do not know it is coming.

Not in the sense of not knowing that people retire. They know that. But they have never once been asked to picture the actual Monday, and so they are all quietly assuming that things carry on.

And when it happens, it will land on them all at once, and they will handle it the way people handle a thing that arrives all at once, which is badly for about six months.

There is a passage where a man in exactly your position asks God about exactly this, and the shape of the request is the useful part.

Set a man over the congregation

Moses is told he is not going in, and he makes a request about the people rather than about himself.

Let the LORD, the God of the spirits of all flesh, set a man over the congregation. (Numbers 27:16, King James Version)

Set a man. He asks God to do the setting.

Not: let me pick. Not: let the people choose. He hands the choosing to God and he does it in the same breath as calling Him the God of the spirits of all flesh, which is a phrase about knowing what is inside people.

You have somebody choosing who knows what is inside every person involved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that setting. Numbers 27:16 puts the setting in the hands of the God of the spirits of all flesh, and He is doing it in this case whether or not anybody in an office knows it.

Now notice what Moses does not ask for, because it is the thing you have been mourning.

He does not ask for the right to choose. He does not argue about it. He does not say he has led these people for forty years and therefore ought to have a say.

He asks that the setting be done by somebody who sees inside people, and then he moves straight on to the reason.

You are not being cheated out of a right you were promised, and it is written that the man who led them for forty years handed the choosing over. The Spirit of God is the one holding that choice, and Numbers 27 shows the most experienced leader in the book letting go of it.

And here is his reason, in the verses right after, and it is the whole thing for you.

That the congregation of the LORD be not as sheep which have no shepherd. He is not worried about the successor's quality. He is worried about a gap.

You have been given the gap to work on rather than the choice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that concern in you three months ago. Scripture puts a leader's concern on the people being left rather than on who arrives, and Numbers 27:16 is where it belongs.

What you can actually hand over

Let me be practical, because there are two things here and only one is yours.

Who is sent is not yours. It is not going to be yours and no amount of anything makes it yours, and a man can spend two years grieving that and hand over nothing.

What is yours is what those nineteen people know before the Monday, and that is a great deal, and it is entirely in your hands.

You have the whole of the preparation in your hands, and it is written that the setting belongs to God while the shepherding still belongs to the shepherd. The Spirit of God is the one who divided it that way, and He divided it on purpose.

And what they need is not reassurance about the successor. You cannot give that and it would be a lie.

What they need is three things and you can give all three.

They need to know it is coming, so that it is not a shock. They need to know which things about the work will still be true afterward, because there are many and they will not think of them. And they need to have heard you say that they are good at this, out loud, before the day it matters.

You are able to hand over all three of those, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes those three things hold when a stranger walks in. Scripture has the outgoing leader concerned with the gap rather than with the appointment, and Numbers 27 is why they are the right three.

Tell one of them, and tell them one true thing

So here is the thing to do, and it is one person, and it is this week.

Pick one of the four who have been with you more than a decade. Tell them plainly that there will be a Monday and somebody new.

Then tell them one thing that will still be true afterward. Something specific. That the way the two of them handle a difficult customer is not written down anywhere and will still be theirs. That the man who does the windows will still come on a Wednesday. Something real.

You are handing over preparation rather than reassurance, and Numbers 27:16 leaves the setting to God and the getting ready to you. The Spirit of God is the one present in that conversation, and He is not anxious about how it lands.

Do not promise anything about the person who is coming. Do not speculate. If they ask what the new one will be like, say you do not know, because you do not.

And then do it again with the next one, in a month, with a different true thing.

You have nineteen conversations available rather than one large announcement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries those conversations to the Monday. The written word puts the concern on the flock rather than on the appointment, and Numbers 27:16 hands the rest of it to Him.

Then open in the morning, because there is still a run of this left and it is still yours.