The List That Never Gets Shorter

The list on that fridge has fourteen things on it and it has had roughly fourteen things on it for nine years.

Not the same fourteen. That is the point. She does them. She crosses them off, most days, with a certain amount of satisfaction, and by the following morning the list has quietly regenerated like something in a fairy tale.

Washing. The bins. The thing with the school. Ring the surgery, they never answer. Bread.

She is not run ragged. She would want that said. There is help, the children are not small any more, she has a life outside this house and she likes it.

It is more what she noticed at the sink about three weeks ago, drying the same pan she dries every night of her life.

Everything I do today will need doing again tomorrow.

Not everything. But nearly. She has spent nine years on a set of tasks whose defining feature is that they undo themselves overnight, and if you asked her what she has built she would have to think about it for a long time, and the honest answer is that she has built nothing you could point at, because it all gets eaten and worn and used up and it is meant to.

She has told nobody this, because it sounds like a complaint about a good life and it is not one.

If you have stood at a sink and thought that, come and sit down at the table. Nobody is going to hand you a system.

Not in vain is a sentence about now

There is a line at the end of the great resurrection chapter, and it arrives after eight hundred words about the dead being raised, and its ordinariness is the whole point.

Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labour is not in vain.1 Corinthians 15:58

Paul has just finished describing the most enormous thing he ever wrote about, and the application he draws from it is not visionary. It is: keep going, and know that your work is not empty.

The word for labor there is the tiring kind. Not achievement. Effort, of the sort that leaves you needing to sit down.

And not in vain is written in the present. He is not saying it will turn out later to have mattered. He is saying it is not empty now, while you are doing it, in the tense you are standing in.

You have not been doing empty work, and it is not empty this evening while you dry a pan. 1 Corinthians 15:58 puts not in vain in the present rather than in a promise, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in that kitchen every night of nine years, which means the thing you concluded at the sink is not what Scripture concludes.

God builds with things that get used up

Now here is the second half, and it takes the sting out of the whole business.

You have been measuring by what remains. That is a reasonable instinct and it is how most of the visible world works. But look at what God actually chose to be central, and notice what happens to it.

Bread that goes stale. Manna that could not be kept overnight and had to be gathered again every single morning, which was not a design fault but the arrangement itself. A meal that gets eaten. Water poured out. A body broken and given.

Almost nothing at the center of Scripture is a monument. Nearly all of it is consumed.

You are not living a smaller life than the people who have something to point at, and nothing you have done has been overlooked. 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 at every meal that got eaten, so the fact that it did not last is not the same as the fact that it did not count.

And hear the part this site will not break. Nobody is telling you to do more of it. There is no target here and no suggestion that nine years should have produced a monument.

You have already been faithful, in the present tense, in a stretch of days you have been quietly writing off. Luke 16:10 says the one faithful in very little is faithful also in much, and it is the Holy Spirit who has made a very little into the actual substance of a household.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep the days. You have not been holding this house up on your own, and you were never the only reason it stood.