The Year I Thought It Was for Nothing

She said it out loud last Tuesday, in the corridor by the linen store, to nobody.

I have done all this for nothing.

It has been a hard year on that ward. She will not tell you the details and this page will not ask for them. Enough to say that she has cleaned rooms that were emptied in ways nobody wants to think about, and gone home, and come back, and done it again, and that somewhere in the spring something in her that used to hold went thin.

Fourteen years she has done this job.

And the thing that broke through on Tuesday was not grief exactly. It was arithmetic. She stood there with a mop in her hand and totaled up fourteen years, and the sum came out at nothing, and she said so, out loud, to a corridor.

Then she wiped her face and finished the round, because that is what she does, and she has not said it to anybody since.

That is your corridor. That is your Tuesday. And I want to put a sentence in front of you that somebody in Scripture said first, and said in almost your words.

He said it before you did

There is a servant in Isaiah, a man whose whole life is his assignment, and in the middle of his own passage he stops and says this.

Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God.Isaiah 49:4

Read the first half again, because most people hurry past it to get to the yet.

I have labored in vain. I have spent my strength for nought. That is in the Bible. It is not a temptation he is being rebuked for. It is not corrected in the next verse. It is simply allowed to stand as something a faithful servant said out loud in a hard season.

You are not out of bounds for saying it. The written word carries that exact sentence without embarrassment, and the Holy Spirit does not flinch at a woman with a mop saying the same thing to an empty corridor. He heard it on Tuesday and He did not think less of you.

Now look at what the man does next, because it is the whole of the help.

He does not talk himself out of the feeling. He does not produce evidence that the labor worked. He does something much stranger and much sturdier: he moves the location of his work. Yet surely my judgment is with the Lord, and my work with my God.

He puts the assessment somewhere else. Not with the results. Not with the people who did not respond. With God, who now holds it and is responsible for what it amounted to.

You have work that can be handed over rather than totaled up. The written word does not answer the ache with statistics; it answers it by changing whose keeping the labor is in. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that transfer real in a woman in a corridor rather than leaving it as an old poem.

And I want to say something about the arithmetic you did on Tuesday, because it was honest and it was also impossible.

You cannot total fourteen years of that job. Not because the number would be small, but because most of what you did cannot be counted by anybody living. A clean room for a frightened person is not a countable unit. Dignity kept around a bed is not a countable unit.

You were never equipped to do that sum. My judgment is with the Lord, and judgment there means the reckoning, the working out of what it came to. The Holy Spirit holds a reckoning you were never given the instruments for.