Other Men Labored, and I Never Met Them

The road goes up through the trees and then comes out of them all at once, and there is a place at the top where you can pull onto the shoulder and see the whole valley, and he has done that maybe two thousand times.

He found out about the crew from a plaque, and even the plaque is not really a plaque, it is a metal plate on the back of a pull off marker that you would only ever read if you were waiting for somebody and bored.

It says the road was cut between two dates in the fifties, and it gives the name of the contractor, and then it says: and the men who worked on it.

That is all it says about them. Not a list. Not a number. And the men who worked on it.

He is forty one and he has driven this road since he could drive, and his father drove it, and the school bus he was on as a child came up through those trees twice a day for eleven years, and every one of those journeys was on a piece of ground that a crew of men cut out of a hillside with equipment that would look like a museum now, in weather, for money that was not much, and not one of their names exists anywhere he can find.

They are all dead. That is not a guess. Seventy odd years, they are all dead, and every single one of them died without knowing that a boy would ride a bus over their work eleven years running and then drive it for another twenty five.

He has been sitting in the truck at the top for about ten minutes, which he did not plan.

Because the thing he cannot get past is the direction it runs. He is not sad about the crew. The crew, he suspects, would think this whole line of thought was ridiculous. What has him is the reverse: if a man can work like that and vanish, then everything he himself has done is going the same way, and he has been trying, since he read the plate about a month ago, to believe that his own work could be like the road, and he cannot make it hold. It slides off. It reads as loss.

The light is doing the thing it does over that valley in the evening where the far side goes gold and the near side goes blue.

You have your road. Something you use daily that somebody built and vanished from. And you have done the same arithmetic in reverse and it has come out as a warning rather than a comfort. There is a sentence Jesus said to His disciples in a field that puts both ends of it in one line.

One sows and another reaps

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that sends him hunting for reassurance. Look up the contractor. Find a descendant. Prove somebody remembers. I am not going to say it, and not because it would be useless, but because a man in this state wants proof about himself, and no archive holds that.

Jesus is standing in a field near a well with disciples who have just come back with lunch, and He says something to them that is one of the strangest and most freeing things in the Gospels. And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labor: other men labored, and ye are entered into their labors (John 4:37-38).

Read the position He puts them in. Not the sower. The reaper. He is telling them, at the start of everything they will do, that they are standing in a harvest they did not plant, and that other people did the work, and that those people are not in the room.

You have been walking on work you never thanked anybody for, your whole life. That is not a stretch of the text; John 4:38 says you are entered into their labors, present tense and matter of fact, and the Holy Spirit who preserved that line put the reader on the receiving end of somebody else's unremembered work.

And then hold both ends together, because the same verse does. If you are standing in somebody's field, then somewhere a field you sowed is being stood in. The arrangement is not a tragedy that happens to you. It is the arrangement, and Jesus describes it without any grief in His voice at all.

And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap that whereon ye bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and ye are entered into their labours.John 4:37-38

Why it slides off

Now the thing that has actually been happening for a month.

He can hold the road as a fact about the crew. He cannot hold it as a fact about himself, and the difference is not information, it is that one of them is generous and the other one costs something.

To believe your own work will go the way of the road, you have to let go of being present at the harvest, and a man does not do that with an argument. He does it slowly, and usually while looking at a valley.

You have never needed to be present at a harvest to have grown it. Ecclesiastes 11:5 says you do not know the way of the spirit or how the bones grow in the womb, and it uses that as a plain limit rather than as a complaint; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) does the growing in places nobody gets access to.

This is yours right now, at a pull off with the valley going gold: work that is real without being attributed. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and the love you have showed toward His name, and forgetting is what is ruled out; the Spirit keeps the account, and the plate on a marker post keeps nothing at all.

The crew did not need the plaque

Here is the part worth staying with, because it turns the whole picture.

Those men did the work in the fifties for reasons that were sufficient at the time: a wage, a job, a road that needed to exist, and, in some of them, the ordinary satisfaction of making a thing that will still be there. Not one of them was working for a plate on a marker post, and if you could ask them, the idea that the road's value depended on their names surviving would strike them as strange.

The road is the point. It is still the point. It carried a boy to school for eleven years.

Fruit is not output, and a hillside cut in the fifties is where it is easiest to see. Output is a name on a list. Fruit is a road, still there, still carrying people who never think about it, which is exactly what John 15:5 describes when it puts the bearing on the branch and the seeing nowhere at all.

You were making something that will be used by people who never know your name, and that is the design and not the loss. John 15:5 says the branch that abides bears much fruit; the Holy Spirit does the growing and He sends it outward into people who will drive over it twice a day for eleven years.

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 piece of work with nothing asked for. Not a request for it to be remembered. One job, one week, one thing you made. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody puts a plate on that.