The Visits Nobody Counts

Nobody sent her. That is where this starts and it is also the whole of the difficulty.

She is not part of a scheme. She has never been on a rota. There was no meeting at which anybody said her name. She simply started going to see people, one at a time, in their own front rooms, a very long time ago, because somebody needed somebody and she was somebody.

It has been going on for years. She could not tell you how many houses.

She sits, mostly. She drinks tea she does not want. She listens to the same three stories from a man in his nineties and laughs in the right places every time, and she has heard the story about the bus so often that she could tell it herself in his voice.

And here is what came at her a fortnight ago, standing at a bus stop after leaving a house.

There is no record of any of this.

Nobody is counting it. There is no minute book with her name in it, no report, no annual figure. If she stopped tomorrow, no organization would show a gap, because no organization ever knew.

And she found herself thinking, quite clearly and rather bleakly: if there is no record of a thing anywhere, did it happen.

She is not depressed. Her life is full. She would tell you she has been happier this year than most.

It is more that after enough years of doing something that leaves no trace whatsoever, a person starts to wonder about the arithmetic.

If you have wondered the same, come and sit down and have some cake. Nobody is going to ask you to do more of it.

He praised the version nobody could count

There is a set of instructions from Jesus about giving and praying and fasting, and the same sentence turns up at the end of each one, and it is worth reading like it is written.

So that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.Matthew 6:4

Notice that He is not making the best of a bad situation. He is not saying that if nobody happened to notice, God still counts it. He is instructing people to arrange it that way on purpose.

The hidden version is not the fallback. It is the preferred form.

And the reason He gives is not modesty. It is that a thing done in front of an audience has already collected what it was going to collect, and a thing done where only the Father sees is still, so to speak, in circulation.

You have been doing the version Jesus actually recommended, and you have been doing it for years. Matthew 6:4 puts secret and seen in the same sentence and puts the seeing on the Father's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in every one of those front rooms with you, which means the absence of a record on earth is not the absence of a record.

Somebody has been keeping the book you were looking for

There is a passage in Malachi about people in a flat and discouraging stretch who were saying to each other that there did not seem to be much in serving God.

And then a handful of them talked, ordinarily, and the text says the LORD paid attention and heard them, and a book of remembrance was written before Him.

A book of remembrance is not a summary written afterwards. It is a running record kept at the time, of ordinary things, because somebody in the room thought they were worth writing down.

You have been written down, and you were written down on the afternoons 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 at every one of those tea trays, so the record you went looking for exists, and it was never going to be in a minute book.

Now hear the part this site will not break. Nobody is telling you to do more. There is no target here, no rota you should join, no suggestion that your years would have been better organized. A woman who has been sitting in other people's front rooms for a very long time is not being handed anything to add tonight.

You are not living a smaller life than the people whose work appears on a report, 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 in every hallway, which means the arithmetic at that bus stop is simply the wrong sum.

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