The Weight of the Water

Too Heavy to Carry Alone

Only those who have carried the water know its true weight.

Before we could care for the 2,400, we needed to care for the three.

A few days after leaving Hamid Karzai International Airport, three chaplains sat down with me in a private room in Kuwait.

I had arrived as the lead for a SPRINT team tasked with providing spiritual and psychological support to roughly 2,400 Marines and Sailors involved in the evacuation effort. There was no shortage of people who needed care. Yet before beginning that work, I needed to check on three chaplains.

Two were my responsibility and while the third was not directly mine, he was for the time-being.

All three had spent days at HKIA during the evacuation. They had done what chaplains do. They listened, prayed, encouraged, and walked alongside people enduring extraordinary uncertainty. Marines, Sailors, Soldiers, special operators, civilians, and Afghan refugees all passed through those days carrying fear, exhaustion, grief, and unanswered questions. The chaplains carried a portion of that burden with them.

By the time I saw them in Kuwait, they were safe. At least physically.

I have spent enough years in ministry to know that physical safety and recovery are not the same thing.

I wanted to know how they were really doing.

More than anything, I wanted to make sure someone was caring for the caregivers.

Once we were alone, the emotions spilled out. What they had been holding back, the emotions they had been containing for the sake of those in their care, began to flow. In the same moment, I could see both the burdens they had been carrying and the relief that they could finally lay them down—on the altar, if you will.

I led them in prayer and gave them the space to add their own. I assured them that whatever was said in that room would remain with me. Then I gave them time to share whatever was on their minds and hearts.

As I listened, I found myself wrestling with a question of my own. I had trained two of these chaplains for the kinds of challenges they might face as part of a Marine Expeditionary Unit. I knew they were capable. I trusted them. Yet I could not help wondering whether I had given them enough.

Of course, there was no way to foresee what they had just experienced. The evacuation from Afghanistan would become the largest noncombatant evacuation operation in American history.

No training plan anticipates that.

There was relief in that room. Relief that they were out of the fire. There was exhaustion. There was laughter and there were tears, often both at the same time. There was a continuing commitment to care for their people. There was even some guilt, the lingering fear that they might not have been enough, that they might not have done enough, that somehow they should have been able to carry more.

What stayed with me was the palpable sense that something was being set down. Not completely. Not permanently. But for a little while, the room gave them permission to stop carrying everything alone.

Looking back, what I remember most is how sacred that room felt.

Over the course of my ministry I have stood in many sacred places. Hospital rooms. Funeral homes. Memorial services. Places where the living gathered to mourn the dead.

Yet this was different.

Perhaps it was the most sacred encounter of my career that involved care for the living rather than the dead.

It was sacred because a United Methodist, a Southern Baptist, a Roman Catholic, and a Seventh-day Adventist could enter a room carrying different traditions, different assumptions, and different understandings of the faith and still encounter the presence of a loving and unifying God in that place.

When I left that room, I knew they would be okay. Not because the burdens had disappeared or because they were finished processing what they had experienced.

I knew they would be okay because they were still focused on the right things. They still cared deeply about their people. They were willing to be transparent and vulnerable about what they were carrying. Despite their exhaustion, they were still functioning.

They needed time, respite, and space to process what they had experienced.

But they were going to be okay.

As I listened, I realized that another generation of chaplains was now encountering some of the same realities of war that had shaped so much of my own generation.

Yet even in that room it was obvious that no two experiences were identical. Each chaplain was in a different place. Each possessed a different level of resilience. Each had experienced HKIA differently. Each was carrying a different burden and would travel a different road in the months and years ahead.

As I think back to that room and continue to process my own experience of that moment, I realize that I was witnessing different responses to the same event. Each chaplain carried away something different. Each would process it differently. Each would carry burdens that extended far beyond that room.

Yet that is not what has stayed with me most.

What has stayed with me is what unfolded in that room.

It would take me years to understand fully why that room remained so important to me.

Before we could care for the 2,400, we needed to care for the three.

Before they could continue carrying the burdens of others, someone needed to help carry theirs.

In the years since, I have found myself reading a familiar passage of scripture differently than I once did.

For most of my life, when I read the story of Moses standing on the hill while Israel fought below, I paid attention to Moses.

These days, I find myself paying attention to Aaron and Hur.

Because Moses isn’t the only one doing the work in the story. Aaron and Hur enter the scene and fill a fundamental role that is at least as important as the role Moses plays.

Moses is the leader God has called, and Moses is up to the task. But the task is enormous and the weight of the task is overwhelming.

Aaron and Hur can see and feel the weight Moses is carrying. They recognize his exhaustion. They see it in his changing affect and failing strength. And so they step forward to distribute the load.

They become the literal foundation for Moses’ continued success.

They carry the weight so that Moses can remain functional.

We notice Moses when we read the story because Moses is God’s chosen leader in one of the most important moments in the history of Israel. We tend to overlook Aaron and Hur because they are not the main characters. They are only a small part of the story.

Yet reflecting through a career of witnessing chaplains carrying the water, their actions have become a model for something much larger. The burden of caring for a community was never meant to belong to one person alone.

We often celebrate the people carrying the water. We should. Their work matters. Yet too often we mistake admiration for support. We assume that because someone continues to carry the burden, they no longer feel its weight. Healthy communities do something different. They recognize when the load is becoming too heavy and step forward to help carry it.

Aaron and Hur remind us that healthy communities recognize who is carrying the weight and choose to help bear it.

Aaron and Hur understood something we often leave unspoken: empathy.

They understood that Moses was the leader. They understood that Moses was the one called by God. And yet they also understood the burden of that leadership and of that role. They could literally feel the weight of Moses’ burden through his changing affect.

And their empathy encouraged them to act.

One of the fundamental emotions that makes chaplaincy effective is empathy. The ability to consider what it is like to walk in someone else’s experience.

This is what made the three chaplains effective at HKIA.

This is what made Aaron and Hur so effective.

This is what made the room in Kuwait so sacred.

Yet empathy does not belong only to chaplains.

It belongs to all of us.

It is what allows us to recognize when someone is carrying more than they were ever meant to carry alone.

Aaron and Hur did not become Aaron and Hur because they held a title. They became Aaron and Hur because empathy moved them beyond awareness and into responsibility. They noticed, they understood, and they acted. They helped carry the burden.

Looking back, I think that is what happened in that room in Kuwait. For a brief moment, three chaplains who had spent days carrying the burdens of others were given permission to set some of that weight down. The burden was not removed, but it was shared.

Perhaps that is what makes community possible. Not that some are called to carry the water, but that others are willing to help bear its weight.

The community owns the weight of the water—not just the caregivers.