I Run The Slides

There is a specific thing she does that she has never explained to anybody, because there is no conversation in which it would come up.

She clicks about half a beat before the line is needed.

Not on the line. Not after it, obviously. Half a beat early, so that a person's eye has already found the words by the time their mouth needs them, and so that nobody in that room ever has the experience of hunting.

She worked that out in her second year. Before that she was clicking on the line, correctly, and the room was singing correctly, and it was a fraction worse in a way that nobody could have named.

She has been doing it for nine years.

She knows every song in that rotation. She knows which one has a repeat that is not marked and catches new people out. She knows that the third verse of one hymn is where two people in that congregation come apart every single time, and she has stopped putting the next slide up quickly on that one, which nobody has ever noticed, and which gives them about four extra seconds.

Two hundred people sing in that room. None of them think about the screen.

And she is entirely clear about what her work is, in a way that took her a while to accept, which is this: the only time anybody in that building experiences her existence is when she gets it wrong.

Nine years of doing something well produces exactly nothing to observe. One misfire produces two hundred people looking up.

What this is not

Let me say it right at the front so you are not braced for it.

This page is not going to promise you that anybody will notice. I do not know that. You may do this another nine years and never be thanked and neither of us would be surprised.

And it is not going to hold you up as an example to anybody. There is no paragraph coming where the ones at the back get set in front of the ones at the front. That is just moving somebody to a different stage.

And it is not going to tell you that hidden work outranks visible work. It does not, and you would take that apart in about a second.

You are not being consoled here, and nothing on this page asks you to be pleased about being invisible. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in one clause about who the work is for, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a person reconciled to being filler before He would speak to her.

The clause that names the audience

Here is the verse, and it is the second half of it that matters most.

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.Colossians 3:23

Read the second half first, because it is the part that gets skipped.

And not unto men. Which is not an instruction to stop caring what people think. It is a claim about where the work is actually going.

Paul writes that to slaves, incidentally, which is worth knowing. To people whose work was completely uncredited by definition, whose entire output was attributed to somebody else, and who had no prospect at all of being thanked by anybody.

And he does not tell them to reframe it or to find satisfaction in it. He tells them where it goes.

You have been working for an audience who has been present at every one of those services and who has never once needed the screen to fail in order to know you were there. I am not stretching that. Colossians 3:23 names the recipient of the work explicitly, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a person at a desk at the back of a room.

Heartily is the strange word

And then the other half, which is stranger than it looks.

Do it heartily. The word underneath is about the soul, about doing a thing from the whole of yourself.

Which is an odd instruction to give about slides, until you remember the half beat.

Nobody asked for the half beat. Nobody would have known. The version where you click on the line would have passed every inspection anybody could run, forever.

You do it half a beat early because of something in you that will not do it the other way, and that is precisely the thing Paul is describing, and it is the part of your work that is most completely invisible and most completely yours.

You have been doing it from the whole of yourself for nine years in a way no inspection could ever detect, and the word calls exactly that heartily. That is Colossians 3:23 in its own vocabulary, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at that desk for nine years and has seen every single half beat.

And the four extra seconds

Now the specific thing.

In the third verse of one hymn there are two people in that congregation who come apart, every time, and you have stopped putting the next slide up quickly, and they get four seconds.

Nobody knows. Not the two people, who could not tell you why that verse is easier here than it was at their old church. Not the person leading. Not anybody.

That is a decision made about two particular human beings, repeatedly, over years, by somebody at the back of a room who they have probably never spoken to.

You have been doing pastoral work with a mouse for nine years and no one on earth has a record of it. The word says God sees in secret, and Matthew 6:4 says it without any suggestion that a witness would have improved the thing, and the Spirit who bears witness has been in that room for every one of those third verses.