Nobody Sees the Job It Gave Me

Something happened to him at thirty one and he does not talk about it and he has never doubted it.

He would not use big language. What he says, on the two occasions he has said anything, is that he asked and something came and he was different afterward in a way that has held for nine years.

He is forty now.

And what it appears to have been for, as far as he can tell, is a set of things nobody sees.

He drives an elderly neighbor to two appointments a month and has done since the spring after it happened. He has been to see a man from his old crew in a facility eleven times in two years and the man has known who he was on maybe four of those. He does the accounts for a small thing his cousin runs, badly funded, which takes him a whole Sunday every quarter and which nobody has ever thanked him for because nobody knows he does it.

None of that bothers him. He is not a man who needs to be thanked and he would find the suggestion irritating.

What has started to bother him is quieter and it arrives late at night about once a month.

If something real happened at thirty one, and what came out of it is a car journey and a visit nobody remembers and a set of accounts, then either the thing was smaller than he thought or he has done something wrong with it.

The sentence, unsaid: if this were the real article, surely something would show by now.

You may know that arithmetic. Something real received, and nine years of nothing anybody could point at.

Labor and His working in one sentence

There is a short line at the end of a chapter where Paul describes his own working life, and it puts two things together that most people keep apart.

Whereunto I also labour, striving according to his working, which worketh in me mightily.Colossians 1:29

Read the two halves. First, I labor, striving. That is a man describing effort, and the word behind striving is the one you would use for an athlete in a contest. He is not describing something effortless.

Then the second half. According to his working, which worketh in me mightily. The effort is real and it is running on something that is not his own.

Paul does not resolve those into each other and he does not apologize for holding both. He labors, hard, and the power is God's, and both are in one sentence.

That matters for a man who has spent nine years quietly wondering whether the effort proves the absence of anything else. It does not. On this verse the effort is the evidence rather than the alternative, and a man who is tired on a Sunday afternoon over somebody else's accounts is standing exactly where Paul is standing when he writes it.

You are working out of something that is not your own supply, and Colossians 1:29 puts a man's own striving and the mighty working of God in a single line without treating either as a contradiction, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a description of a working life and lands it on a man driving to two appointments a month.

No audience anywhere in the verse

Consider what is not in that sentence, because the absence is the answer to the thing that arrives at night.

There is no observer. There is no result reported. Paul does not say the labor produced a visible outcome, or that anybody noticed, or that the mighty working was confirmed by anything happening in a room.

The verse contains a man, an effort, and God working in him, and it stops there. Whatever verification the reader might want is simply not offered, and Paul appears not to have felt the lack.

You have been looking for a confirmation the verse does not contain, because the written word names the striving and the working and reports no audience at all, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an absence in a text into a weight coming off a man at midnight.

And notice the word mightily. Paul uses it about the working of God in him, not about the visible effect of his labor. The strength is described as being in the man, doing something in there, and the description stands whether or not anything out here looks like it.

You have something described as working mightily where nobody is looking, and Colossians 1 puts the mighty working inside a person rather than in the results, and the same Spirit who is doing the working is the one who fills.

Nine years is not a verdict

Now the thing that arrives at night, which deserves a direct answer rather than encouragement.

He has done nothing wrong with it. There is no verse anywhere that describes a filling as a deposit a man can mismanage into invisibility, and there is no scenario in which the correct use of the last nine years would have been more visible and he missed it.

What he has been doing is the thing the verse describes. Real effort, in unremarkable places, running on something he did not generate, with no report filed anywhere. Eleven visits to a man who knew him four times is not a failure to use something. It is the shape of the working.

And it is worth being exact about those eleven visits, because they are the hardest thing in the list and he has never once counted them as difficult. Seven of them, by his own arithmetic, were spent with somebody who did not know he was in the room. Nobody does that on enthusiasm. Nobody does that because it is rewarding, and nobody does it eleven times unless something is running underneath that does not require the man opposite to respond.

You were never given something you could waste by being unseen, because Colossians 1:29 attaches the mighty working to a man's labor and never to its visibility, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that a relief rather than one more thing to examine himself about.