Ready by Five and Nobody Sees It

There are nineteen buses in that depot and she does them in the same order, front to back, and the order is hers and nobody has ever asked about it.

Half past two in the morning. The lamps are on over the yard. Her radio is on low because the depot is enormous and silence in an enormous place is a lot to carry on your own.

Floors. Rails. The bit behind the driver's seat that everybody misses. The seats where somebody has been eating chips, and the one at the back that always has something under it, and the window somebody breathed a word onto that has to come off properly or it will show at six when the sun is up.

By five it is done. All nineteen. She goes home as the first drivers arrive, and she passes them in the yard, and they say all right and she says all right, and that is the sum of it.

At about seven, people she will never meet get onto a clean bus and do not think about it once.

She has done this eleven years, and last week, walking home, a thought came at her sideways: I have never once been in the room when my work is being used.

That is your depot. That is your half past two. And I want to say something to you about who is actually in that yard at that hour.

The eyes are in every place

There is a short line in Proverbs that people usually quote as a warning, and it is at least as much a comfort.

The eyes of the Lord are in every place, beholding the evil and the good.Proverbs 15:3

In every place. Not in the important places. Not where there is a congregation, or a crowd, or somebody senior. In every place, which includes a bus depot at half past two in the morning with the lamps on and one woman working.

And read the second half, because it is the half nobody quotes: beholding the evil and the good. The good is being beheld. That is a watching that takes note of what is right, not only what is wrong.

You are worked with a witness in that yard. Not alone. Not unobserved. The written word puts God's eyes in every place and has them taking notice of the good, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a live thing in a woman with a mop trolley rather than a proverb she half remembers.

Now let me name the ache exactly, because you named it well yourself.

It is not that nobody thanks you. You would find a fuss awkward and you know it. It is that you are never in the room when the work is used. The bus is clean at five and full at seven, and you are asleep, and the two halves of the thing never meet in your own experience. You do the labor and somebody else does the benefit, and you never see it join up.

You are not missing the part that matters. The written word does not put the value of work in the worker seeing its use. The Holy Spirit has been present at both ends of it, at half past two and at seven, and He is the only one who has ever seen the whole arc.

And here is what happens on those buses at seven, which you have never watched and which is real.

A woman gets on to go to a hospital appointment she is frightened about, and the seat is clean, and it does not fix anything and it is not nothing either. A boy goes to school. A man who has been up all night going home sits by a window you cleaned properly, and looks out of it.

You have been making somebody's difficult morning slightly better every day for eleven years. Beholding the good, says the written word, and the good here is nineteen buses and one woman and a radio on low. The Holy Spirit has beheld every round.