The Kettle And The Lamp

The kettle in that kitchen takes two minutes and eleven seconds, and he knows it because there was a stretch when he counted.

Four in the morning. Nobody on the floor. The lights go on in banks as he walks the corridor and go off again behind him, and the only sound in the whole building is the machine on the third floor that nobody has ever managed to switch off.

He has been doing this a long time. Long enough that he does not think about it. He does the bins, he does the glass, he does the little kitchen on each floor, and when he gets to the fourth he puts the kettle on because that is the one with the good tea and nobody has ever said anything about it.

Here is the part he has never said out loud, not to his wife and certainly not to anybody at his church.

He has decided that his week does not count.

Not in a dramatic way. He would not put it like that. If you asked him he would say he was fine, and he is fine. It is only that when people at the Sunday table talk about what they have been doing, he finds that he has nothing to bring, and after enough years of having nothing to bring, a man quietly concludes that there is nothing there.

Two hundred and forty rooms a week. Nobody watching a single one of them. And a slow, unexamined arithmetic underneath it all that says: work nobody sees is work that does not add up.

If your week is like that, come and sit at this table a minute. I am not going to tell you to do more of it.

The oldest job in the book was done where nobody could see it

There is an instruction in Exodus that I have never been able to get past.

The lamp in the tabernacle was to burn continually, and a man was appointed to tend it, and the tending was done inside a tent with a curtain across the front of it. No congregation. No audience. Somebody trimming a wick in the small hours in a room where the only one who could possibly see him was God.

Command the people of Israel to bring you pure beaten olive oil for the light, that a lamp may be set up to burn regularly.Exodus 27:20

Read the word regularly and then read it again. Not spectacularly. Not memorably. Regularly, which is the least impressive word in the sentence and the whole point of it.

Nobody ever wrote down the night that lamp did not go out. There is no chapter about it. There is a nation that walked past a glow in the dark for generations and never once thought about the hands.

You are doing the oldest work in the book, and you are doing it in exactly the room it was always done in. That is not a compliment I have arranged to cheer you up; Exodus 27:20 puts the lamp behind a curtain on purpose, and the Holy Spirit who lives in you is the one keeping your hands steady at four in the morning in an empty building. Unwitnessed is not the same as unimportant. It never was.

God keeps a book, and He did not start it at the interesting part

There is a strange, small sentence in Malachi that most people read straight past.

A group of people who felt exactly what you feel were talking to each other. Not preaching, not testifying. Talking. It says they spoke often one to another, and then it says something that ought to stop a person in the corridor: the LORD listened and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before Him.

Somebody was writing it down. Not the highlights. Not the year they did something worth reporting. The ordinary conversation of ordinary people who were quietly getting on with it in a season when nothing was going particularly well.

You have been written down, and you were written down on the nights you assumed nobody was counting. 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 present in every one of those two hundred and forty rooms, so the record is not a summary somebody made up afterwards. It is a real book about real hours.

And here is what I want to say plainly, because this site never asks a tired man for more. Nobody is telling you to increase anything. There is no target here. You have already been faithful, in the present tense, in a week you thought was empty. The word in Luke 16:10 says the one faithful in a very little is faithful also in much, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has made a very little into the actual substance of a life.

God is the one keeping you while you keep the lamp. That sentence is the whole of it, and it is not a closing courtesy: your two hundred and forty rooms sit inside His keeping, not the other way round.