The Path She Cleared Every Autumn

The council does the road. Nobody does the path.

It runs behind six gardens and comes out by the bus shelter, and in October it fills with leaves and in November it goes slick underneath them, and there is a step near the far end that disappears entirely.

She has swept it every autumn for nineteen years.

Not on a rota. Nobody asked her. There was a year when a woman she barely knew went down on that step and broke a wrist, and she came out the following Saturday with a stiff brush and did the lot, and then she did it the next year, and now it is simply a thing that happens in that village and almost nobody knows why.

She is seventy one. It takes her three mornings, spread out.

Here is what she has never said to anybody.

She has begun to feel that a life made of jobs nobody assigned is a life nobody is ever going to account for.

It is not bitterness. She would sweep it if it made her cross, and it does not make her cross. It is more that at a certain age a person starts to wonder what the whole of it added up to, and when she looks she finds a great many small unrecorded things, and no list anywhere with her name on it.

Not on a rota, not in a minute book, not in anybody's thank you at any point in nineteen years.

She stood at the top of that path last October with the brush in her hand and thought: I do not know who has been keeping the count of this, and I am not sure anybody has.

If you have thought something like that, come and stand at the top of the path. Nobody here is going to tell you to do more.

Somebody was writing it down

There is a passage in Malachi that most people read straight past, and it is about people who felt exactly what you feel.

They were in a flat and discouraging stretch. Nothing was going particularly well. And the complaint going round was blunt: what is the use of serving God, and what have we got out of keeping His charge.

And then a group of them, who felt all of that, did something small.

Then those who feared the LORD spoke with one another. The LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before Him.Malachi 3:16

Read that slowly. Not a sermon. Not a great work. They talked to each other, in a discouraging season, and Heaven took a note.

And a book of remembrance is a very particular thing. It is not a summary somebody writes afterwards. It is a running record kept at the time, of ordinary things, because somebody in the room considered them worth keeping.

You have been written down, and you were written down on the mornings 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 on that footpath every one of those nineteen Octobers, so the record is real and it is not a list anybody in the village was ever going to keep.

Unassigned is not the same as unnoticed

Now let me deal with the thing underneath, because it is very common in people who do jobs nobody gave them.

You have half concluded that work only counts if somebody assigned it, because that is how the visible world operates. Rotas, minutes, thank yous at the end of the year. If it is not on a list, it did not officially happen.

But look at how Jesus talks about it. He talks about the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, and about a Father who sees in secret, and He says it approvingly rather than as a consolation prize. He is not describing second best faithfulness for people nobody noticed. He is describing the preferred arrangement.

You are not living a smaller life than the people whose work appears on a list, and you have not been overlooked. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unjust so as to overlook your work and the love you have shown in serving, and it is His Spirit who has been present for every barrowload, which means the arithmetic you did at the top of that path is simply the wrong sum.

Now hear the part this site will not break. Nobody is telling you to do more. There is no target, no rota, no suggestion that nineteen autumns should have been something else. You are seventy one and you sweep a path in three goes and that is entirely enough.

You have already been faithful, in the present tense, in a stretch of years 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 village, so this is not a promise about later. It is a description of now.

And underneath all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep the path. You have not been holding that step up on your own for nineteen years, and you were never the only reason anybody got safely to the bus.