Are You Jealous for My Sake?

In 2023 I officially became head of operations for a maternal health nonprofit here in Philadelphia.

It was not my vision. It was my friend’s — her idea, her burden, her baby. She had carried it from nothing, and everyone around her was used to it working exactly one way: through her. That was not a complaint anyone was making. It was simply the shape of the thing. Her organization, her call, her voice.

And then she asked me to come help carry it.

Here’s what I did not expect. Three and a half years later, there are still people who struggle with the idea of me having a say. Not because I’ve done the work badly. Because I am not her.

I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve stopped taking it personally, because I don’t think it’s really about me at all. I think it’s loyalty. I think the people who have the hardest time with my presence are the people who love her most, who watched her build it alone, and who have quietly decided that the organization is only really itself when it’s coming directly from her.

They are protecting her. They are also, without meaning to, protecting the exact arrangement that was wearing her out.

Last Sunday I told you that if everything runs through you, the problem is design, not discipline. I stand by that. But I left out the part that took me the longest to see, because it’s the part that doesn’t look like a problem at all.

Sometimes the reason you haven’t handed it off is that someone who loves you has made it very clear they’d rather you didn’t.

Two men who weren’t in the room

There’s a scene in Numbers 11 that I’ve read over for years, because I was busy watching Moses.

Moses is at the end of his rope in this chapter. The people are complaining about food, he’s carrying all of them alone, and he says something to God that most of us would never say out loud — if this is how you’re going to treat me, just kill me now. He is not guarding his position. He is asking to be released from it.

So God gives him seventy elders. He takes the Spirit that was on Moses and distributes it to them, and Moses loses nothing in the transfer. Nothing is subtracted from him. That’s the mechanism. Hold onto it, because in about four verses somebody is going to miss it entirely.

Then this happens.

Two men, Eldad and Medad, had stayed behind in the camp. They were listed among the elders, but they had not gone out to the Tabernacle. Yet the Spirit rested upon them as well, so they prophesied there in the camp. A young man ran and reported to Moses, “Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp!”

Joshua son of Nun, who had been Moses’ assistant since his youth, protested, “Moses, my master, make them stop!”

But Moses replied, “Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all the Lord’s people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit upon them all!”

Numbers 11:26–29 (NLT)

Read Joshua’s line again, because everything is in it.

“Moses, my master, make them stop.”

He isn’t worried about heresy. Eldad and Medad are on the list — they’re supposed to have the Spirit. They just weren’t at the tent. They received it in the camp, on their own ground, without the ceremony, and a young man ran to report it like something had gone wrong.

And Joshua — who has been at Moses’s side since he was a boy, who has never once been disloyal — hears that report and immediately moves to shut it down.

Not for himself. For Moses.

That’s what I need you to see. Joshua isn’t ambitious here. He isn’t jockeying. He is doing what devoted people do: he is protecting his leader’s singularity, and he has confused that with protecting his leader.

I know this passage from the camp side. I am Eldad in this story — listed, called in, given something real to do, and doing it somewhere other than where people were used to looking. The reports still get run up the hill. She’s making decisions over there. And the person carrying the report usually believes they are doing my friend a favor.

“Nobody does it like you”

I want to name the sound of this, because it does not arrive as opposition. It arrives as a compliment.

It’s the longtime client who says she’d stay, but only if she’s working with you directly — not your associate, not your team, you. It’s the friend who talked you into starting the business in the first place and now says she just hates the idea of you letting someone else “take over”. It’s the first employee, the one who’s been there since the beginning, who has an opinion about every new hire and somehow none of them are quite right.

Every one of those people is being sincere. That is what makes this hard. They are not manipulating you. They genuinely believe no one else can do it the way you do, and they are frequently correct, and it does not matter.

Because here’s what that sentence does when you’re already tired: it gives you permission to stay stuck and calls it a standard.

I know the feeling of being told I’m irreplaceable. It is a good feeling. It is also, on the specific day when I know God is asking me to hand something off, the exact wrong feeling to be sitting in.

So be careful with it. Notice who reaches for that line, and notice when they reach for it. If somebody only tells you nobody’s as good as you in the moment you’re trying to let go of something, that isn’t praise. That’s a hand on your sleeve.

And here’s the part Joshua needed to hear and you need to hear: the weight isn’t theirs. They don’t carry it home. They don’t wake up at 4 a.m. with it. Which means the decision about whether to share it was never theirs to make either.

The other side of this

Now turn it around, because half of you are not Moses in this story.

Half of you are Joshua, and you have no idea.

Who are you quietly keeping small?

I’d guess it doesn’t feel that way from the inside. From the inside it feels like looking out for her. You’re the one who tells her to be careful about that partnership. You’re the one who’s not sure about the woman she’s thinking of bringing on. You’re the one who says, gently, that nobody’s going to care about her vision the way she does — and you say it because you believe it, and because you have watched her build this thing from nothing, and because you would hate to see someone come in and take it from her.

But look at what that protection actually produces.

She stays in it alone. She keeps doing the work that a hire could do, the work that a system could do, the work that another woman with the same Spirit on her could do just fine in her own camp. She keeps maintaining her success by hand. And she is exhausted, and you are the one telling her she’s the only one who can.

That isn’t protection. It’s a cage with a nice view.

Let’s be clear: if your loyalty requires her to stay the only one, your loyalty has become her ceiling.

Joshua wanted Eldad and Medad silenced. Think about what that would have cost — two more men with the Spirit, ready to carry people, shut down before they opened their mouths, because they hadn’t received it the approved way and because one devoted man thought his leader deserved to be the only voice.

Moses wouldn’t allow it. I wish all the Lord’s people were prophets.

That’s not false modesty. That’s a man who understood that the Spirit on him was never a limited resource, and that more people carrying it meant fewer people standing in line waiting for him.

What he gained

Here is the thing Joshua could not see, and the thing I missed for years.

Moses did not lose anything when the seventy received the Spirit. Read verse 25 again. God took what was on Moses and put it on them, and there is not one word in the text about Moses being diminished. No subtraction. No dilution. The elders weren’t a replacement plan. They were room.

Room to keep hearing from God instead of settling disputes from morning till evening. Room to lead instead of process. Room, frankly, to stop asking God to kill him.

Sharing the load did not make Moses less of a leader. It made it possible for him to keep being one.

This is the part I can speak to from inside, so let me be specific about it.

My stepping into that organization took nothing from my friend. She is still the visionary. It is still her burden and her call and her name on it, and it always will be — I have never once wanted that and I would not be good at it. What I brought was a decade of operational expertise she did not have and did not need to develop, and what that bought her was not a smaller role. It was room. Room to think. Room to lead. Room to sit with God about where this thing is going instead of spending every hour keeping it running.

Nothing was subtracted from her. Something was added to her, and it arrived in the shape of a person.

That’s the arithmetic the Joshuas of the world get wrong. They’re doing subtraction on something God built to multiply.

And I think that’s the fear underneath all of this, for the Moseses and the Joshuas both. We have quietly decided that our value is located in our indispensability — that the reason we matter is that it would fall apart without us. So we defend the bottleneck, or we let someone else defend it for us, and we call it excellence.

You are not valuable because you’re the only one. You were never the only one. You’re valuable because God put something on you and asked you to steward it — and stewarding it well eventually, always, means putting some of it in other hands.

The one thing to do this week

Two questions. Answer whichever one makes you uncomfortable first, because that’s your assignment.

1. Who in your life tells you that nobody can do what you do — and when do they say it? Not whether they’re right. When. If the compliment shows up most reliably at the exact moment you’re considering handing something off, write that down. You don’t have to confront anybody this week. Just stop letting that sentence make the decision.
2. Whose expansion have you been quietly voting against? Someone you love is trying to bring people in, and you have opinions about all of them. Write her name down and then write down honestly what you’re afraid of. Then ask yourself whether what you’ve been calling protection has actually been keeping her doing it alone.

That’s it. Name it, don’t fix it. Naming it is the whole assignment.

A prayer for this week

With love,
LaKeisha

“Well done, good and faithful servant.” — Matthew 25:23