The Word Unrighteous Is Doing The Work

Half past nine at night and the light over the sink is the only one on downstairs, and four of them are drying up in a kitchen that is too small for four.

It is her brother's house. There has been a birthday. Everybody has gone except the ones who dry up, which is always the same three plus whoever is nearest the towel.

Fifty-five.

Her mother died in February. Nine years of it before that: the first two easy, the middle four a job, the last three something that does not have a name.

And at the table earlier, her brother, who is a good man and who came at weekends, said something to the room about how they had all got through it together, and everybody agreed, warmly, and somebody said something about how Mom had been lucky with her family.

She said nothing. She dried a bowl.

Because underneath the whole evening there is a fact that she has never once said out loud and does not intend to. In nine years, nobody thanked her. Not once, not by anybody, not in a card, not at the funeral, not tonight.

And the thing that has grown out of that, which is worse than resentment and quieter, is a conclusion: that if nobody noticed it, then in some real sense it did not happen. That it is not on any record anywhere. That nine years of a life went past and left no mark at all.

If you have carried something nobody ever named, you know that conclusion, and you know you would not say it in a kitchen at half past nine.

He makes it a matter of righteousness, not of kindness

Weigh it first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it is never trimmed to get somewhere warmer.

What this costs is not thanks. It is the record. It costs you the ordinary human confirmation that a thing happened, which is what other people's noticing actually provides. It costs nine years, which had a first two and a middle four and a last three, and only you know how different those three were. It costs the sentence at the table tonight, which was said by a good man and which quietly rewrote it. And it costs you a conclusion, formed alone, that unwitnessed and unhappened are close enough to the same thing.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your nine years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before we go on: if February and everything before it have taken you somewhere darker, as far as thinking the family would have simpler evenings without you at the sink, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the three who always dry up, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who stay behind and pick up a towel.

Now, Hebrews, and read the word the writer chose, because he could have chosen an easier one.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

God is not unrighteous to forget.

He does not write that God is too kind to forget. He does not write that God is too loving, or too gracious, or too tender. He makes it a question of righteousness, which is a legal word, which means the writer is not describing a nice quality in God's character. He is saying that forgetting your work would be a wrong.

That is a very strong sentence and almost nobody says it out loud.

You are inside a verse that makes remembering your work a matter of God's own righteousness. Hebrews 6:10 puts it in legal terms rather than sentimental ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a letter written to exhausted people and lays it on a kitchen at half past nine.

Now, the phrase after it: your work and labor of love. Two words, deliberately. Work, which is the doing. And labor, which in that language carries the sense of the cost of it, the wearing out, the thing that is spent and not recovered.

The verse names both. What you did, and what it took out of you. And it says that both are held.

You have the cost of it counted and not only the doing of it. That is written into Hebrews 6:10, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes a legal sentence land in a woman with a towel in her hand.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because a whole evening of warm things has already been said in that house.

It does not promise that anybody is going to thank you. Not your brother, not at Christmas, not ever. I am not going to predict a conversation in your family, and I am not going to tell you that they will one day understand, because that is a comfortable thing to say and I do not know.

And I am not going to go looking for an achievement in your nine years to hand back to you. That would be the same measuring with a nicer result, and the guardrail on this whole subject is that a life does not have to produce something in order to have counted.

You were never asked to be witnessed in order to be recorded. Scripture makes forgetting the work a wrong that God will not do, and the same Spirit who inspired that verse is the one who carries it into a small kitchen.