Nothing I Can Show You

Somebody asked Hazel what she had done with her life and she could not think of anything.

She was not being modest. She stood there in a kitchen with a tea towel and genuinely tried to answer it, and what she came up with was: nothing you could put on a table.

Here is what forty years actually looks like from inside.

She has prayed for a list. It is in the front of a notebook, in pencil, and it has been rewritten twice because the paper wore through, and it has about sixty names on it and some of those people are dead now and she has kept them on.

She took meals. She could not tell you how many and there is no record anywhere.

She sat with people. That is most of it, honestly. She sat in kitchens and in one hospital corridor for a great many hours, mostly saying nothing useful, because she has never been quick with words and she knows it.

And she taught the eight-year-olds for twenty-nine years.

That is the part she would most like to be able to show you something for, and she cannot. She has never once, in twenty-nine years, seen anything happen in front of her. No moment. No child who turned round in the room. She has heard other people describe such things and she believes them and it has never happened to her.

She has a private word for it that she has never said out loud, and the word is nothing.

A woman came to see her in the spring.

Forty-one, and she had to explain who she was, and Hazel got there about halfway through.

And it was not the story you would expect and Hazel would want me to be honest about that. The woman did not say Hazel led her to anything. She has had a complicated life and she said so plainly and she does not go anywhere at the moment.

What she said was this.

She said: "You told me once that God knew my name. And you said my name when you said it. And I have thought about that every year of my life since."

Hazel does not remember saying it.

She has gone back over it since, hard, trying to find the afternoon, and there is nothing there. It would have been an ordinary Sunday and she would have been putting chairs away.

Now let me ask you what you would put on the table.

Because if this is yours you have just tried, and you have come up with a list of things that do not sound like anything when you say them out loud, and you have a private word for it too.

Where he puts the evidence

Paul writes fifty-seven verses about the resurrection. It is the longest sustained argument in his letters: the historical witnesses, the logic, what happens if it did not occur, the nature of the body, death swallowed up.

And then he lands the whole thing, and this is the last verse of the chapter.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

Therefore.

That word is carrying fifty-seven verses. Everything he has just proved about Christ being raised comes down, in the end, on a sentence about ordinary people not wasting their effort.

Now look at where he puts the evidence.

He does not say: your toil is not in vain, because look at the results. He does not point at growth, or numbers, or anybody who turned round in a room. There is not one word in that verse about fruit you can see.

The reason given is in the Lord. The whole weight of it rests on the resurrection, which he has just spent a chapter establishing, and the argument is this: if Christ is raised, then nothing done in Him is lost, because the one holding it is not dead.

That is a completely different foundation from the one you have been standing on.

Toil is also worth having. The word is the one for labor that wears you out. Paul is not describing pleasant service. He picked the exhausting word on purpose and then said it is not in vain.

So hear this said over you, standing in a kitchen with a tea towel unable to answer a simple question. Forty years of small unrecorded things are held by a risen Christ and not one of them has been lost, and the absence of anything you could show somebody was never evidence about any of it. That is written as the conclusion of the longest argument Paul ever made, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one at work in a believer to will and to do, and He has been working in a Sunday afternoon you cannot even remember.

Now let me be careful, because there is a thing I could say here that would be sentimental and useless.

I am not going to tell you that there are dozens of stories like that woman's and you will hear them one day.

I do not know that. There might be. There might be one, and she came, and that is the only one you get, and I am not going to build you an imaginary crowd to make you feel better, because you would know I was doing it.

And I am not going to tell you that the visible things do not count. They do. The people who saw children turn round in a room are not deceived and they were not doing something shallower than you.

Here is what I am saying, and it is Paul's, not mine.

You have been grading your life with an instrument the New Testament does not use.

You built a table in your head, forty years ago, and you have been trying to put things on it ever since, and the table only accepts a certain kind of object: visible, countable, attributable. Almost nothing God does through an ordinary person is that shape.

You said a girl's name out loud once on an ordinary Sunday while stacking chairs. That is exactly the shape of the work, and you did not know you had done it, and it went into somebody for thirty-three years.

The word says your toil is not in vain in the Lord, and Paul gives the resurrection as the reason and offers no other. And the Spirit of God is the one who works in you both to will and to do for His good pleasure, which means the sixty names in pencil and the hours in that corridor were His work happening, not your attempt to produce His work.

This tradition has always been slightly suspicious of the visible tally, and not out of gloom. It said that God works through ordinary means, quietly, over generations, and that a church which can only recognize Him when something is countable will miss almost everything He does, including most of its best people.