The Water He Carries Up Every Morning

Eleven years, every dry morning, up that hill with water.

The trees were not his idea. A group of people planted them a long time back and most of that group has moved away or got old or lost interest, which is what happens to groups.

He was not even one of them. He simply lived at the bottom of the hill and noticed one summer that nobody was coming.

They are getting on now. Some of them are taller than he is. The ones on the exposed side are still small and will always be small and he waters those anyway.

He is fifty two. Those trees will be worth looking at in about forty years.

Here is the thought that landed on him a few weeks ago on the way down with the empty cans.

I am doing this every morning for a thing I will not see.

Not bitterly. He is not looking for credit and would be embarrassed by any. It is more that he was tired, and the arithmetic did itself, and the answer was that eleven years of mornings had produced a hillside of medium sized trees that nobody has ever mentioned and that he will be dead before anybody sits under.

And underneath that a quieter question. Whether mornings that are aimed at something you will not be there for are mornings that count for anything at the time.

He has told nobody. There is no natural way to raise it.

If you have carried water up a hill for something you will not see, come and sit on this rock. Nobody is going to ask you to do more.

He put little and much in one sentence and did not rank the person

There is a line of Jesus that gets read as a warning and is one of the kindest things He said.

One who is faithful in a very little is also faithful in much.Luke 16:10

Look at what He does with the word little. He does not despise it, and He does not treat it as a rehearsal for something bigger later. He says the same quality is present in both, which means the quality does not scale with the size of the result.

Faithfulness is not a small version of something larger. It is the identical substance in a can of water and in a kingdom, and God is looking at the substance.

That answers your arithmetic directly. You were measuring the mornings by what they will eventually produce. Jesus measures them by what they are made of, and He measures them now.

You have been faithful, in the present tense, on eleven years of mornings that have produced nothing anybody can point at yet. Luke 16:10 puts the very little and the much in one breath without ranking the person doing them, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been on that hill with you every dry morning, which means the mornings are not waiting on the trees to become worth something.

Somebody has been keeping the record you went looking for

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

And 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.

Not a summary written 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 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 present at every row you watered, so the record exists and it was never going to be on that hillside.

Now hear the part this site will not break. Nobody is telling you to do more. There is no target, no suggestion that eleven years should have been organized differently, no hint that you should recruit anybody. A man carrying water up a hill for trees he did not plant is not being handed anything tonight.

You are not living a smaller life than the people whose work is finished in their lifetime, and none of it 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 in every one of those mornings.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep the hill. You are not holding a hillside up on your own, and you were never the only reason anything grew.