I Make The Coffee

He gets there at twenty to nine, which means leaving his house at twenty past eight, which means the alarm on a Sunday is set earlier than it is on a weekday, and has been for seventeen years.

Two urns. They take about fifty minutes between them and they have to be started in a particular order because of the outlet in that hall, which he found out the hard way in his second year.

Ninety cups on the long table, in rows, not stacked, because stacked cups take an extra second each and ninety extra seconds at coffee time is the difference between a line and a crowd.

Milk into four jugs. The one with the chip is his and he uses it deliberately so nobody else gets it.

And the good tin, which comes out for the people who cannot have the ordinary stuff, and which he has replaced out of his own pocket for eleven years without mentioning it, and which about six people in that congregation depend on and none of them know is a decision anybody makes.

Seventeen years.

And here is the arithmetic he does most weeks, usually while he is doing the milk, and which he has never once said out loud.

If he stopped, somebody would notice for two weeks. Then there would be instant in a jar. Then in about a month it would simply be what coffee at that church was, and in a year nobody would remember it had ever been different.

That is not self-pity. He has watched it happen to other things. It is just what he believes is true.

What this page will not do

Let me get this said before anything else, because you have heard versions of this before and they did not help.

Nothing here is going to promise you that somebody will notice. I do not know that and I am not going to say it. You may do this for another seventeen years and never be thanked properly and that would not surprise either of us.

And nothing here is going to turn you into a lesson about humility. You are not an illustration. There is no paragraph coming where the quiet ones are held up as an example to the visible ones, because that would just be putting you at the front of a different room.

And nothing here is going to tell you that unseen work is more spiritual than seen work. It is not. That is a flattering lie and it does not hold.

You are not about to be given a consolation, and there is nothing here that asks you to be pleased about being overlooked. That is not caution on my part. Scripture is what handles this, in one sentence of Jesus that picks the smallest possible thing on purpose, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man reconciled to being filler before He would speak to him.

He chose the smallest thing He could find

Here is the sentence, and the choice of example is the entire argument.

And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.Matthew 10:42

A cup of cold water.

Not a house. Not a year of service. Not a rescue. Water, which in that place and time cost nothing at all, handed to somebody, once.

He is at the end of a long and serious passage about being sent out and about what it will cost, and He finishes it there, at the smallest transaction He could think of.

And notice the word only. A cup of cold water only. He anticipates the objection. He knows exactly what a person thinks when they hand somebody a cup of water, which is that it is nothing.

You have been handing out the thing He deliberately chose as His example, and He put the word only into the sentence Himself because He knew what you would think about it. I am not stretching that. Matthew 10:42 selects the smallest possible act on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man doing milk into four jugs at twenty to nine.

Shall in no wise lose his reward

And then read the guarantee, because it is unusually strong.

Shall in no wise lose. That is emphatic in the Greek in a way English struggles with. Not might not. Not is unlikely to. Shall in no wise.

Which raises a question worth sitting with. What exactly is being guaranteed?

Not that anybody will notice. He does not say that and I am not going to add it.

What is guaranteed is that it is not lost. That there is no mechanism by which the thing you did evaporates because nobody in that hall registered it. It went somewhere. It is held.

You are doing work that is not lost, and the word puts an emphatic guarantee on that without ever promising you that a room will notice. That is Matthew 10:42 in its own emphasis, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that hall at twenty to nine for seventeen years and has missed none of it.

The six people and the good tin

Now let me say the concrete thing, because you have been thinking in abstractions about whether you matter and there is a specific fact available.

Six people in that congregation drink out of the good tin.

They do not know somebody chooses it. They do not know somebody pays for it. What they know is that when they come to that hall on a Sunday there is something there that they can have, and that in most rooms they go into there is not, and they have stopped bracing for it in this one building.

That is not nothing and it is not filler. That is six people not bracing.

You cannot measure it and nobody will ever report it to you and it will not appear in any account of that church.

You are producing an effect in six people that they themselves could not describe and that no one has ever counted, and the word says plainly that God is not unrighteous to forget work like that. Hebrews 6:10 says exactly that in its own words, and the Spirit who was given to bear witness is not standing in that hall waiting for somebody to make an announcement.