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?

Psalm 137:1-4

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More tomorrow

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Reflecting on Nehemiah 1. Taken from A Great Work: A Conversation with Nehemiah for People (Who Want to Be) Doing Great Works.