Ninety Drops and Nobody Knows My Name

Ninety-one today, and the app said he was three minutes behind at half four, which he was not, because the app has never once accounted for the flats on Marlowe Road.

He has done this for four years. He is good at it. He knows which streets you do in which order, which buzzers do not work, which gate is faster on foot, and he has never had a complaint that stuck.

And the shape of the day is this: he pulls up, he lifts, he walks, he hands something over or he puts it down and photographs it, and he goes. Most doors, nobody says anything beyond cheers. A good number do not look up from the phone.

He is not asking for a conversation. He does not want one, particularly, at door sixty on a wet afternoon.

What has got heavier is something else. Somewhere in the last year he stopped being able to answer the question of what it is for. Not the money, he knows what the money is for. The work. Ninety-one lifts and ninety-one doors and a van back in the yard, and it is exactly as though he had not been in that city at all.

That is your van. That is your ninety-one. And I want to speak into that, because there is a sentence written to people whose work nobody thanked them for either.

Who it is done to

Paul is writing to a mixed church, and this line goes to the people with the least prestigious work in the room.

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.Colossians 3:23

As to the Lord, and not unto men.

He does not tell them to find meaning in the task. He does not say the work is secretly important. He changes the recipient.

The parcel goes to the flat on Marlowe Road. The work goes somewhere else. Two different destinations for the same act, and the second one is where the value is settled, and it is settled before anybody at the door decides whether to look up.

And whatsoever ye do is deliberately total. There is no category of task excluded from it, which means door sixty on a wet afternoon is inside the sentence.

You have work today that goes somewhere before it reaches the door. Not ninety-one nothings. The written word changes the recipient rather than inflating the task, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man carrying a crate up three flights because the buzzer is out.

Now let me say something about the people who do not look up, because four years of this can quietly build a case.

They are not slighting you. Somebody is on a call. Somebody has a baby that has just gone down. Somebody has had the sort of day where the door is opened on autopilot, and you have had that day yourself, and none of it is a verdict.

You have not been dismissed by anybody. The written word never puts the value of your work in the reaction it gets. The Holy Spirit is fond of the people behind every one of those doors.

And now the actual question, the one you stopped being able to answer.

What is it for. You have been trying to answer it by looking at the effect, and the effect is invisible to you: you never see what the parcel was, or what it meant, or whether it mattered. That question was never going to yield anything by that route.

You are not required to see the point in order to be doing it. As to the Lord, and the Lord receives the work whether or not you are told what it accomplished. The Holy Spirit has been in that van for four years and has seen every lift.