Morning by Morning

Rubén has opened that building for twenty years and nobody has ever described him as doing anything.

That is not the same as being unloved. He wants that understood and so do I. People are warm with him. He gets asked about his knee and his grandchildren and somebody always brings him something at Christmas.

It is that what he does has never once been named as a thing.

Here is the actual list, which nobody has ever written down.

He unlocks at seven. He puts the heating on in the winter, which has to be done early because that building takes two hours. He sets the chairs, which is not one job, because there are four different layouts depending on what is on. He fills and switches on the urn. He checks the roof leak, which has been fixed twice and is not fixed. He changes the bulbs on the stairs, which need a specific ladder. He knows which door has to be lifted while you turn the key.

And he locks it at nine, and he is the last one out, and he has done that most days of the week for twenty years.

They had an anniversary service in the spring.

Lovely evening. Somebody had put real work into it and it was warm and not self-congratulatory, and near the end they read out the names of the people who serve.

Twelve names. The music, the youth work, the pastoral team, the group that does the meals, the woman who has run the accounts for fifteen years.

Every one of them earned. He would say so himself and he means it.

His name was not read.

Not deliberately. Nobody sat in a room and left him off, and if you asked any of those twelve they would be horrified, and two of them would go and say something to him about it, badly, which would be worse.

It simply did not occur to anybody, because what Rubén does is not a ministry. It is the building being open. It is the state the room is in when you arrive, and a state is not a thing somebody does. It is just how the room is.

He was fine about it in the room.

He went home and sat in the kitchen with his coat still on for about half an hour, and he has not told anybody about that, including his wife.

He was ill in the winter. Two weeks, nothing serious.

It took four people to cover it. They still got the heating wrong twice and one Sunday the chairs were in the wrong layout and the urn was not on.

And on the second Sunday one of them said, out loud, to nobody in particular, "How does he do all this?"

Now let me ask you whose names got read out.

Because if this is yours, there was a list, and you were not on it, and you were fine about it in the room and you know exactly where you were sitting.

Written into the register

There is a chapter in Chronicles that most people skip because it is a list of names, and the fact that it is a list of names is the entire point.

First Chronicles 9 is a register. Who came back, who lived where, who did what. It is the sort of chapter that gets called dry.

And in the middle of it, God's record of His returned people gives four verses to the doorkeepers.

They were in charge of the gates of the house of the Lord, the house of the tent, as guards. And they lodged around the house of God, because the watch was committed to them; and they were in charge of opening it morning by morning.1 Chronicles 9:23 and 27

The watch was committed to them.

That is a strong word. Not: they helped out. Not: they also did the doors. Committed, entrusted, given into their keeping, and the text uses the same seriousness it uses everywhere else in the chapter.

They were in charge of opening it morning by morning.

And then read what the chapter is doing to them by existing at all.

It names them. Shallum, Akkub, Talmon, Ahiman, and it names their fathers, and it says how many there were and where they slept and which side of the house each family had.

The chapter that lists the priests and the singers lists the men who opened the doors, in the same register, at the same weight, with the same care over their fathers' names.

So hear this said over you, sitting in a kitchen with your coat still on. What you do has been entrusted rather than merely tolerated, and God kept the doorkeepers' names in His own record with their families attached. That is written into a register God had preserved for two and a half thousand years, and it is the Holy Spirit who is at work in a believer to will and to do, and He has been at work at seven in the morning in an empty building for twenty years.

Now let me be careful about the twelve, because I will not have this article become a grievance.

They earned it.

The woman who has done the accounts for fifteen years has done something genuinely hard and thankless. The youth work is real. Nobody on that list was inflated and nobody took your place.

And the person who wrote the list was not careless in their heart. They were writing a list of ministries, and the categories they had did not have a box for what you do, and the reason there is no box is precisely that you have done it so consistently that it has stopped looking like an action.

That is a real cost and it is the exact cost of doing something well for twenty years. A thing done perfectly and continuously becomes weather. Nobody thanks you for weather.

And here is the part that I want you to hold on to, because it came out of a man's mouth on the second Sunday of your illness.

How does he do all this?

That question had never been asked in twenty years, and the only thing that made it askable was you being absent. That is not a sad fact about your church. It is the structure of the work itself, and it would be true anywhere, and it was true of Shallum and Akkub too.

The word says God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, and that verse was written to people in the middle of it. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in you both to will and to do, which means twenty years of a seven o'clock alarm has been Him working and not you grinding.