The Hour She Gives To Nobody

There is a chair in the small back bedroom of that house that nobody else sits in.

It is not a special chair. It came out of a skip in about the year her son was born and it has a cushion on it that has been squashed flat.

She goes up there for an hour, most days, and shuts the door.

She has a list, of sorts, although it is not written down any more. Her family. Three or four people from that town who do not know she does it. A woman she has never met whose situation was mentioned to her once, years ago, and who has been on the list ever since. A place. A situation. Somebody's marriage.

Nobody knows. Her husband knows she goes up. He does not know what happens.

Here is the weight, and it has grown slowly and she has never once described it.

The main work of her life is entirely invisible.

If you asked anybody in that street what she does, they would say she is lovely, and that she looks after everybody, and none of them would mention the hour, because none of them know about the hour, and the hour is the actual center of the whole thing.

And she has begun to wonder, in a way that unsettles her, whether a life whose main work leaves absolutely no evidence is a life anybody could point at and call anything.

She has not said that out loud, because it sounds as though she wants credit, and she does not want credit, and there is no version of the sentence that does not sound like she does.

If you have an hour nobody knows about, come and sit down. Nobody is going to ask you for more of them.

The room with the door shut is where He said to go

There is an instruction from Jesus about exactly this room, and it is worth noticing that He is not making the best of anything.

But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.Matthew 6:6

He recommends the shut door. He does not tolerate it. Given a choice between a visible prayer and an invisible one, He sends people upstairs.

And read the second half of that sentence, because there are two participants in that room and only one of them is you. Your Father who is in secret. Not your Father who observes the secret from elsewhere. Who is in it. The room with the door shut is described as somewhere God already is, and where He is at home.

You are not alone in that room and you never have been. Matthew 6:6 puts the Father inside the shut door rather than outside it, and it is the Holy Spirit who Romans 8:26 says helps in our weakness and intercedes when we do not know what to ask, which means the hour that leaves no evidence has had two others in it the entire time.

Invisible is not the same as unrecorded

Now let me answer the thing you have not been able to say out loud, because it deserves an answer and not a reassurance.

You have wondered whether work that leaves no evidence is work anybody could point at.

The honest answer is that nobody on earth can point at it, and that is not going to change, and I am not going to pretend otherwise or promise you that one day somebody will find out.

But there is a passage in Malachi about people in a discouraging stretch who talked to one another, and it says the LORD paid attention and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before Him. Not a summary made afterwards. A running record kept at the time, of ordinary things, because somebody in the room thought them worth writing down.

You have been written down, and you were written down in the hours nobody knew about. Malachi 3:16 says the book was kept for those who feared the Lord and thought on His name, and it is the Spirit of God who has been in that back bedroom every morning, so the record exists and it was never going to be on this street.

And hear the part this site will not break. Nobody is telling you to do more. There is no target, no suggestion that an hour should be ninety minutes, and no hint that the years would have been better spent. A woman who gives an hour a day to people who will never know is not being handed anything tonight.

You are not living a smaller life than the people whose work is visible, and nothing you have done is unaccounted for. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love you have shown, and it is His Spirit who has been present in every one of those hours.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep the hour. You have not been holding those people up on your own.