I Mow The Churchyard

Tuesday evening, about six, which is the right time because the dew is off and it is not too hot and the light is good for another three hours.

Two and a half hours if he does it properly, which he does. The open part first, then the awkward strip along the west wall where the mower cannot turn, then the stones, which are the actual work.

The stones take a string trimmer and a hand shears and a certain amount of getting down on one knee, and there are forty-one of them, and he knows which ones lean and which ones you have to be careful around because the base has gone.

He knows the names on all forty-one. Not deliberately. You cannot cut round a stone for twenty-eight years and not know the name.

There are two he keeps particularly clear. One is a child from 1954. The other is a man he knew, which is different work altogether and he has never told anybody that he does that one last, on purpose, and sits on the wall afterward for a bit.

Twenty-eight summers. His own time. Mostly his own gas, though the church would pay if he asked and he has never asked because asking would start a conversation about the whole arrangement.

And he knows exactly what happens if he stops.

It goes to seed in one season and looks abandoned in two. Then somebody raises it at a meeting. Then they get a quote and it turns out to be a lot of money, and they discuss it twice, and eventually they hire somebody who does the open part and strims round the stones badly, and that becomes what the churchyard is.

What this page is not going to do

Straight out, so you can read the rest without waiting for it.

Nothing here is going to promise you that anybody will notice. I do not know that and I am not going to pretend to. You may do this for another twenty-eight summers and never be thanked properly 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 quiet men are held up in front of the visible ones, because that is just standing a man at the front of a different room.

And nothing here is going to tell you that unseen work is worth more than the seen kind. It is not, and you would not have any patience for that.

You are not being consoled here, and there is nothing on this page that asks you to be pleased about going unnoticed. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a chapter that most people skip, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man reconciled to being filler before He would speak to him.

The chapter everybody skips

There is a chapter in Nehemiah that is nothing but a list.

The wall of Jerusalem is being rebuilt, and chapter three is thirty-two verses of who repaired which part. Names, families, and lengths of masonry. That is the whole chapter. People skip it in reading plans and nobody has ever preached it at a conference.

And it is one of the most extraordinary things in the Old Testament, if you stop and ask what it is doing there.

After them repaired Zadok the son of Immer over against his house. After him repaired also Shemaiah the son of Shechaniah, the keeper of the east gate.Nehemiah 3:28-29

Over against his house. Which means: the bit outside his own door. The stretch he walked past every day.

Nobody in that chapter is doing anything visible. Nobody is leading. They are patching masonry, one length each, mostly the length nearest them.

And it is written down. By name. And it is still written down two and a half thousand years later, and you can read the name of a man who fixed the bit of wall outside his own front door.

You are doing exactly the category of work that God had recorded by name and kept in Scripture for two and a half thousand years. I am not stretching that. Nehemiah 3 is a list of ordinary maintenance credited person by person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written chapter like that and lands it on a man on one knee beside a leaning stone.

Why it was written down like that

Now ask the question that chapter raises and never answers directly.

Why would a book of Scripture spend thirty-two verses on this?

Not to teach anything. There is no doctrine in that list. Not to inspire, particularly. It is a very dry read.

The only thing it does is refuse to let the work be anonymous. Somebody, deliberately, wrote down who did which bit. In a project where the headline was Nehemiah and the wall, God's book spends a chapter on the men who did the lengths.

That is not an accident of record keeping. It is a decision about what is worth preserving.

You are doing the sort of work God has demonstrated He keeps records of, in a book where He could have written anything. The word gives a whole chapter to it without a word of moral about it, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that churchyard for twenty-eight summers and has watched the awkward strip along the west wall every single time.

And the two stones

Now the specific thing, because you have been thinking generally and there is something particular here.

There are forty-one stones and you know every name.

There is a child from 1954 whose family, if any of them are still living, are almost certainly not in this county, and who has been kept clear by a man they never met for twenty-eight years.

And there is the man you knew, which you do last, and then you sit on the wall.

Nobody has ever seen you do either of those things. There is no record of them anywhere on earth except in the fact of the grass being short.

You have been keeping two graves clear for twenty-eight years in a way no living person knows about, and the word says the parts nobody watches are necessary rather than admirable. That is 1 Corinthians 12:22 as it stands, and the Spirit who bears witness has been sitting on that wall with you every time.