I Take Out The Trash

There are nine containers in that building and he empties all nine, and he can tell you which room fills fastest and why.

The one in the small kitchen is the worst because of the coffee grounds, which is his own fault for setting up the coffee arrangement the way he did fourteen years ago, and which he has never mentioned because then somebody would try to change it.

The one in the room where the young families sit fills with things that are not trash and go home with him in a plastic tub: one glove, a book somebody's child was reading, a set of keys once.

Sixteen years.

After a big event it is nine bags plus whatever the kitchen produces, plus the cardboard, which does not go in the containers because there is a limit on those and the church cannot afford a second collection, so it goes in his truck and he drives it to the depot on a Monday, in his own truck, on his own gas.

He has done that about two hundred times.

And here is the thing he is entirely settled about, and he would say it flatly if you asked, though nobody ever has.

This is the one job in that building that no human being has ever thought about.

They think about the music. They think about the children's rooms and the coffee and the sound. Somebody once did an entire meeting about the flowers. In sixteen years the words trash and cardboard have never appeared on any agenda, and that is not neglect, it is that trash is a thing that people experience as simply not being there.

What is not on this page

Let me put it plainly before anything else.

Nothing here is going to promise you that somebody will notice. I do not know that. You may do this for another sixteen years and never once be thanked, and that would not surprise either of us.

And nothing here is going to make you an example to anybody. There is no paragraph coming where the man with the bags is set in front of the people who do the visible things.

And nothing here is going to tell you that this outranks anything else in the building. It does not.

You are not being consoled here, and nothing on this page asks you to be pleased about being unconsidered. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one clause of Jesus that describes a Father rather than encouraging a servant, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man reconciled to being filler before He would speak to him.

He describes the Father, not the servant

Here is the sentence, and the thing to notice is who it is about.

That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:4

Read it again and count how much of that sentence is about you.

Almost none of it. Your part is one clause: that it may be in secret. The rest is a description of somebody else.

Thy Father which seeth in secret. That is not an encouragement. It is a description of a characteristic. He is the kind of God who sees in that particular place, the way you might say a bird is the kind of animal that sees in the dark.

And that means the seeing is not something that happens because you deserve it or because the thing was worthy. It is simply what He does, in that place, all the time, whether the thing is worth seeing or not.

You have been working in the one place Scripture specifically names as where the Father is looking, and that is a description of Him rather than a reward for you. I am not stretching that. Matthew 6:4 puts the emphasis entirely on His characteristic, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man carrying the fourth bag out to a truck.

Himself

And then one word in the middle that people read past.

Himself shall reward thee.

Not somebody on His behalf. Not a system. Not the natural consequences of good work. Himself.

Which is worth sitting with for a man who has driven cardboard to a depot two hundred times in his own truck without a single conversation about it ever having happened.

You are dealing directly with somebody who has reserved this specifically to Himself, and the word puts that pronoun in on purpose. That is Matthew 6:4 in its own emphasis, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that back lot for sixteen years and has counted every bag.

And the plastic tub

Now the specific thing.

There is a tub in your truck with a glove in it and a book somebody's child was reading and once a set of keys.

You take things home that are not trash and you bring them back and you put them somewhere they will be found, and nobody has ever known that a decision is being made, because what they experience is a lost glove turning up.

Sixteen years of small rescues that are indistinguishable, from the outside, from luck.

You have been the reason a hundred small things did not get lost and every one of those looks to everybody else like nothing happened. The word says the parts nobody watches are necessary, and 1 Corinthians 12:22 says it exactly like that, and the Spirit who bears witness has been beside that tub every time.