I Do The Half Nobody Sees

Somebody will say, at the end of it, that she did the whole thing on her own.

They will say it warmly. They will mean it as praise and it will be largely deserved and you will nod, because you agree.

And you will have driven two hundred and ten miles in three days, collected two people from two different places, spent an hour and a half on a thing that broke on the morning, carried everything in and everything out, and been the last person awake in the house on both nights.

Nobody is lying. It is that the work you do is the kind that leaves no trace. A meal is visible. A room that has been made ready is visible. A journey is not. A repair that happened before anybody got up is not. Clearing up is the specific removal of evidence that anything took place.

You have never said a word about it and you are not going to, and I understand exactly why. Saying it out loud would sound like a man asking to be thanked, and there is very little you would find more embarrassing.

But here is what I think has started to happen, and it is why you are reading something like this at all. Somewhere in the last two or three years, a small hardness has arrived. Not resentment exactly. Something more like a private, slightly cold accounting that runs while somebody is being praised, and you dislike it, and you cannot make it stop.

Thy Father which seeth in secret

There is a sentence of Jesus about hidden work that is more precise than the way it usually gets used.

That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:4, King James Version)

Which seeth in secret. Not: who will find out about it later. Not: who is told about it afterward by somebody. He sees in the place where it happens, at the time it happens, as it happens.

That is a claim about location. There is no interval in which your work is unwitnessed. The two hundred and ten miles had a witness in the car. The thing that broke on the morning had a witness in the room.

And He is called Father in that sentence, which matters. This is not a supervisor logging output. It is the particular attention of somebody who is glad to see it.

You have never done one of those journeys unwitnessed, and it is written into Matthew 6:4 that the Father sees in the secret place itself. The written word puts the seeing at the location rather than in a later report, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live fact for a man on a dark road at eleven at night.

And then the second half, which is the one that speaks to the hardness.

You are owed nothing by anybody in that house, and Scripture puts the rewarding entirely with the Father rather than with the people served. Matthew 6:4 says himself shall reward thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the account out of a man's hands so he can stop keeping it.

Where the hardness comes from

Let me be exact about the hardness, because I do not think it is what you fear it is.

This is not a man becoming bitter. Bitterness is settled and this is not settled; it arrives, you notice it, you dislike it, and it goes. That is a different thing, and the fact that you dislike it is most of the evidence you need about your own character.

What the hardness actually is, is an account with only one side. You do the work, nobody records it, and something in you keeps a record anyway, because a working human being cannot help it. The ledger has entries and no acknowledgements, and it has been running for years, and it makes a small cold noise whenever somebody says she did the whole thing on her own.

You were never wrong to have kept an account, and the written word never once shames a person for wanting their work to be seen. Matthew 6:4 answers that hunger by moving the seeing rather than by denying it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a hunger and a fault.

And here is the thing you have probably decided is the only option, and I want to close it off. The available move is to say something. To drop it lightly into a conversation, as a joke, at a good moment. And you have half done that once or twice and hated yourself afterward, because it comes out sounding exactly like what it is.

That is not the move. But silence in every direction is not the move either, and that is the only alternative you have been offered.

You have been choosing between two moves and neither one was ever the right one, and Scripture opens a third direction entirely. Matthew 6:4 hands the record to the Father, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a man finally says his work out loud to somebody who was already there.

Say it in the right direction

So here is the assignment, and the direction is the whole of it.

Name one job you did that nobody knows about, and say it out loud to God.

One. Not a list. The specific one that made the noise this year: the drive, the thing that broke on the morning, the two hours on the second night.

Say it plainly, out loud, in a room by yourself. I drove two hundred and ten miles and nobody knows, and I would like that said out loud once.

You are able to name it in the one direction where naming it costs nobody anything, and it has never once required a single person in that house to be told. Matthew 6:4 has the Father already in the secret place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man saying a plain sentence to an empty room.

And I want to say why this works, because it sounds too small to work and it is not.

The hardness comes from a thing being unsaid, not from a thing being unrewarded. Said once, in the right direction, the pressure drops, and it drops without creating a job for anybody else and without you having to be a man who fishes.

You are ending a silence rather than presenting a bill, and it has never once been required that anybody in that house acknowledge one mile of it. The written word puts both the seeing and the rewarding with the Father, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives what a man says with nobody there.