Nineteen Years of Fridays

The heater in the church hall wants a boot on its bottom left corner before it will light, and he shows the young man where, because nobody else alive knows.

The young man is twenty-six and moved here in the spring with his wife and a guitar, and this is his first Friday. He is grateful and a little nervous and he keeps saying thank you. The older man shows him the cupboard where the table tennis paddles live and which of the three balls in the tin still bounces, and where the fuse box is, and that the back door sticks in wet weather and you lift as you pull. Then he takes the hall key off his own ring, which takes a minute because it has been on there nineteen years and the split ring has closed over it, and puts it in the young man's hand.

The teenagers start arriving in the doorway with the light behind them, and he does not know one of them. That is right and proper. His lot are gone. Thirty-one of them, over nineteen years, and he could tell you every name and most of the surnames, and he could not tell you tonight where twenty-eight of them are on a Sunday. They left for the city at eighteen the way everybody leaves here at eighteen. A few of them found him on the internet years later and said hello and then went quiet. One of them, he heard at the feed store, is doing well. That was the whole of the report. Doing well.

He stands by the door a minute longer than he needs to, and the young man is already at the table tennis table with a boy who is losing badly and laughing about it, and he thinks the thing he has thought on more Fridays than he would admit. If anything came of me, it happened in somebody else, and I was never shown.

You know that doorway. Whatever your hall was, a classroom, a kitchen you taught teenagers to work in, a truck cab where a young man learned to drive and to pray, a spare room where you had somebody's kid for a year that was not their fault, you poured into people who then did what people do, which is leave and not write, and the ledger you have been keeping in your head all these years has one column, and it is empty. Nobody wrote back. And somewhere along the way that empty column stopped meaning I was not told, and started meaning nothing came of it.

The account was never yours to keep

Let me name the pit exactly, because it is more precise than disappointment. The book was never handed to you and it got kept anyway. Every Friday the ledger went home, and the empty column drew a conclusion, and the conclusion got quieter and heavier every year until it stopped sounding like a conclusion and started sounding like the truth about a life. Or, the version that hurts more, because it is nearly humble: maybe something came of me, but if I never see it, it might as well not have.

Hear what the writer to the Hebrews said to a room full of people who had served, and served, and been shown very little for it.

For God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love that you have shown for his name in serving the saints, as you still do.Hebrews 6:10

Read the shape of that sentence. He does not say your work was seen by the people you served. He does not say they came back and told you. He says something stranger and much stronger: for God to forget your work would be an injustice, and He is not unjust. Your nineteen years are held in the character of God, and His Spirit is the one who keeps them there. That is a safer place than a letter from one of thirty-one young people who are busy being adults in a city. Letters get lost. He does not.

You are not a man whose life produced nothing because nobody reported back. I am not offering you my own kindness there. That is Hebrews 6:10 stated plainly over you, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it a fact you stand on rather than a nice line you read once, and He was in that hall on more Fridays than you were.

One sows and another reaps

Jesus said a thing to His disciples in a field outside a Samaritan town that I think was said for people like you.

He told them to lift up their eyes and look at the fields, and then He said the old saying holds true: one sows and another reaps. I sent you to reap what you did not work for. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor. That is John 4:38, and He said it as the ordinary arrangement of the kingdom rather than the sad exception, with His Spirit carrying the grain from one pair of hands to another. The sower is not, in the normal run of things, standing there when the grain comes in.

Which means the empty column in your book is not evidence of failure. It is what sowing looks like from the sower's end. Paul knew it too. I planted, he said, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. He planted in cities and left them and wrote letters into the dark, and half of what came of him he read about in reports from other people, and most of it he never read about at all.

And you have entered into the labor of people you never met, and people you will never meet are entering into yours. Jesus said that in John 4 in so many words, and His Spirit is the one who moves the sap from one branch to a branch three towns away without either of them being consulted.

Here is where I have to be careful. I am not going to tell you to look them up, and I am not going to promise you that you will one day be told. You may be. You may not. I would be lying if I said the report is coming. What I can tell you is where the account is kept, and it is not in your head, and it never was.

The farmer sleeps

There is a small parable of Jesus in Mark that gets skipped because it has no drama in it. A man scatters seed on the ground and then he sleeps and rises, night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows, and, this is the whole point of it, he does not know how. The earth produces by itself. First the blade, then the head, then the full grain in the head.

He does not know how. He is not told how. He goes to bed. And the growing happens in the dark, in the ground, in a place he cannot see into, according to a mechanism that was never explained to him, and it is not less real for that. Jesus told that story to describe the kingdom of God. Not the kingdom when it goes wrong. The kingdom working normally.

You are a man who scattered seed for nineteen years and then, quite properly, went home and slept. That is Mark 4, and it is written down as the way the kingdom grows, and the Spirit of God is the earth that produces by itself in thirty-one young people you cannot see into. He does not need you to know how, and He has never once needed you to be shown.

Fruit is not output, and this is where the two come apart. Output is what you can count at the end of the shift. Fruit grew on a branch that stayed attached, and it can grow on the part that hangs over the neighbor's wall, where the branch never sees it picked. Nineteen years of Fridays were not output. You stayed attached, in a cold hall with a bad heater, and something grew, and the count is His.

And what grew through you is real tonight, whether or not you are ever handed the receipt. It is written that God is not unjust so as to forget your work, and His Spirit did the growing where you could not follow it, and neither of those facts is waiting on the post.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the drive you already make, tell Him about one Friday in that hall with nothing asked for and no news wanted. The heater. The ball that still bounced. A boy losing at table tennis and laughing. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody keeps a ledger on that.