The Hall Set Out and Cleared Again

Two hundred and forty chairs go out for assembly, and two hundred and forty chairs come back in, and that is Tuesday.

He does it in rows of twelve because rows of twelve fit the floor. Twenty minutes out, twenty-five minutes back, and in between a thing happens in that hall that he is not present for, because by then he is doing the bins or the boiler or a tap in the girls' toilets that has been dripping since April.

Nineteen years.

He can tell you which floorboard by the stage lifts in wet weather. He knows the hall better than the head teacher does, and the head teacher is the fourth one he has worked under.

And on a Tuesday afternoon in the spring, stacking the same chairs he had put out that morning, a thought landed on him that has been hanging about ever since: I have not built anything.

Nineteen years of putting a room together and taking it apart. No wall anywhere with his name on it. Nothing standing at the end of it that he could walk a grandchild past and say I did that. Just a floor that is clear again, exactly as clear as it was yesterday, ready to be filled and emptied tomorrow.

That is your hall. That is your Tuesday. And I want to get at that thought, because there is a verse that was written for exactly the ache underneath it.

Where labor is kept

Paul finishes the greatest chapter he ever wrote about resurrection, and everybody expects a soaring ending. What he actually writes is a sentence about work.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

Not in vain. The word is the one for empty, hollow, poured out and gone. And notice where the guarantee sits: not in the work, not in the result, not in whether it stayed standing. In the Lord. That is the container.

Which is exactly the question you asked in the hall. You were looking for the place where nineteen years is being kept, and you were looking at the floor, and the floor was never it.

You have labor that is being held somewhere it cannot drain away. Not in the arrangement of a room, which lasts four hours. In the Lord, which is where Paul puts it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man with a chair trolley rather than leaving it as the last line of a famous chapter.

Now let me say something honest about repetition, because you have been treating it as the enemy and it is not quite.

Most of the work that holds the world up is repetition. Meals, beds, floors, water, the same round done again. It only looks like futility from the inside, and it looks like futility because the evidence is destroyed daily by design. A hall that stayed set out would be a failed hall.

You are not doing nothing. Always abounding in the work of the Lord, says the written word, and always takes in the days that undo the day before. The Holy Spirit does not count a task twice-done as a task never done, and He has watched every one of the nineteen years of it.

And here is the part I would like you to carry to the chair trolley.

Children have sat in those rows and been told things they still remember. Somebody's mother came to a concert in that hall and it is one of about nine days of her life she can still see clearly. None of that could have happened in a room that was not set out, and every single time, it was set out by you, and nobody has ever thought about that once.

You have been building something the whole time. Not a wall. The written word is careful to make the labor itself the thing that is kept, rather than what it produced. The Holy Spirit has been in that hall at half past seven every morning for nineteen years, and the chairs were never the point.