If you didn’t grow up in the South, you may not know kudzu. It’s a vine. It was brought in to hold hillsides together and took the job a little too seriously. It climbs trees, telephone poles, barns, anything that holds still long enough. You can spray it, cut it, burn it, and it wilts for a while and then comes back thicker than it was. Where I grew up, in West Blocton, Alabama, it owned the gulch beside the field house.

My senior year of football, one week before the first game, we had been practicing for days in 98-degree heat. We were spent. Coach Yeager gathered the whole team, and instead of yelling, he told us a story about that gulch. He had watched them spray the kudzu to kill it. It withered. Then it recuperated, and it came back stronger. When one leaf goes down, he said, two take its place. It had even wrapped a vine around the door handle of his broken-down car, like it was holding on for him.

Then he told us to look in our helmets.

Five of the most tired young men on that team reached in and pulled out a kudzu leaf.

He didn’t need to explain much after that. It’s okay to be tired. Give a little extra anyway. And when the man beside you goes down, two of you take his place. That was the whole speech. The stadium became the Kudzu Kingdom. The younger players would wave vines from the top of the stands when the team needed something to hold on to. Thirty-five years later, I can still see them up there.

Here’s what I didn’t understand at seventeen. I thought Coach’s purpose was a state championship. That’s what mine was, most days, when it wasn’t just surviving the next practice. He believed in us more than we believed in ourselves, and he never once celebrated mediocrity, and I assumed those two things pointed at a trophy. They didn’t. His purpose was bigger than ours. He was building men who persevere. At fifty-two, I can tell you that purpose was achieved. It just wasn’t measured on a scoreboard, so none of us knew to look for it.

I think about that a lot in my work. Being tired isn’t a character flaw. It’s physiology. The body has real limits, and I sit with people every week who are up against theirs: the caregiver who hasn’t slept a full night in months, the man who is embarrassed that his legs won’t carry him the way they used to. What kudzu taught a football team is true in a living room, too. Tired is allowed. Give a little extra. And let the people beside you take your place when you’re down. Nobody was designed to hold the vine alone.

And I think about it in my faith. Our Heavenly Father’s purpose is greater than ours. Most days mine is survival: get through the visits, return the calls, make it to bed. His is something I can’t see from inside the practice field. But it’s there. The coach who put leaves in five helmets never explained his plan to us. He just kept showing up and refusing to let us be less than we could be. I’ve come to believe God works the same way, and that He does a lot of it through the people around us: coaches, spouses, friends, the kid waving a vine from the top row.

So if you’re in the 98-degree stretch right now, tired, sprayed down, feeling like you’ve withered, I’d say what Coach said. It’s okay. Give a little extra. Then look around and let two people stand in for you a while. Kudzu doesn’t come back stronger because it’s stubborn. It comes back because it never stops reaching for whatever is next to it.

Who is standing in for you right now, and have you let them? I’ll be honest about where I am with it: I’m a lot better at being the second leaf than at letting somebody else be mine.

— Reggie