I Made It Smaller And Nobody Noticed

You took about a third of it off and not one person said anything.

You had braced for the opposite. You had a sentence ready for the person most likely to remark on it, and a slightly different sentence for the one who would have made a joke, and you had run both of them several times in the week before.

Neither was needed. The day happened, people enjoyed themselves in the ordinary way, and nobody mentioned that anything was different.

And instead of relief you felt something small and cold that you have not been able to name since.

That is what I want to look at, because I do not think it is what you fear it is.

You have probably concluded that it means the work was pointless. If a third of it can go without anybody noticing, then a third of it was never necessary, and by extension quite a lot of what you have done over the years was never necessary either, and you have spent a considerable part of your life on something nobody was receiving.

That is the thought, roughly, and it has been sitting there since about the second week of January.

Let me offer you a different reading. Nobody noticing is not the same as nobody receiving. A day that works is not experienced as a set of components; it is experienced as an atmosphere, and an atmosphere has no visible parts. What you removed was not received as an item, because none of it ever was.

Thy Father which seeth in secret

There is a set of instructions from Jesus about doing things unseen, and the framing of it is not what people usually take from it.

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 6:1, King James Version)

The instruction is aimed at people whose work was being seen, and the warning is that visibility is itself a form of payment. If the seeing is the reward, then the seeing is the whole of the reward, and there is nothing further outstanding.

That is a harder saying than it looks, and it is also, tonight, a piece of extremely good news.

Because your work has not been seen. Not this year and, when you think honestly about it, not for a long time. Which means, on the terms Jesus actually sets out, that none of it has been paid out yet.

You have an account that has not been settled by being noticed, and it is written into Matthew 6:1 that being seen is itself the payment. The written word treats visibility as a transaction rather than as a validation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a cold January thought into a fact about an unsettled account.

And notice the phrase He uses about the alternative.

You are working in front of somebody who is described as your Father rather than as an assessor, and Matthew 6:1 says of your Father which is in heaven. Scripture puts the reward in a relationship rather than in a ledger, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that specific for a man who has been quietly wondering whether any of it counted.

What you were actually hoping for

Now let me be exact about the wound, because I think it has been misdiagnosed.

This was never a hope of being thanked. If somebody had thanked you for taking a third of it off, it would have been strange and embarrassing.

What was wanted was information. Specifically: whether the work is worth anything to them, and there had been, without anybody quite planning it, an experiment.

Take a third off. See what happens. And the result came back as nothing, and a result of nothing is very hard to interpret, so you interpreted it in the worst available direction, which is what a tired man does in January.

You were running an experiment rather than fishing for praise, and Scripture never once treats the desire to know whether a work matters as vanity. Matthew 6:1 warns against working in order to be seen, and it does not say a man may not wonder, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference for somebody accusing himself of the wrong thing.

And here is why the experiment could never have worked. The thing you make is not perceived as parts, so removing parts is invisible by design. Nobody in that house has ever had a list. They have an experience, and the experience arrived intact, which is the only result that experiment was ever going to return.

You were never going to get an answer from that experiment, and the written word puts the reckoning of unseen work with the Father rather than with the room. Matthew 6:1 makes visibility the alternative payment, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present with a man who has been reading a null result as a verdict.

Say what you were hoping for

So here is the assignment, and it is the naming of the actual thing.

Name out loud the sentence you had been listening for all day, and say it to God.

Not what you did. Not the third that came off. The sentence itself.

It will be short and it will be slightly embarrassing to say. Something like: I was hoping somebody would say that they could tell how much work it usually is.

You are able to name the sentence you were hoping for, and it has never once made you a man who was doing it for the praise. Matthew 6:1 puts the reward with the Father rather than with the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man saying a slightly humiliating true thing to an empty room.

And I want to say why the naming rather than anything else.

The cold thing in January is not made of the absence of praise. It is made of an unanswered question that cannot be asked of anybody, because asking it would be exactly the thing Matthew 6:1 warns about, and that is why it has been carried silently for eleven months.

Said out loud to the one who was actually watching, the question is asked. It is asked in the only direction where asking it is not a request for payment.

You are asking a real question in the one direction where it costs nothing, and Scripture puts the whole account with a Father rather than with an audience. Matthew 6:1 names the alternative payment plainly, and the Spirit of God is the one who receives a question a man cannot ask anybody in his own house.