She does them on the first Saturday of the month, at the kitchen table, with the good pen and the list.
Two hundred and sixty names in that congregation. Somewhere between eighteen and twenty-six of them have a birthday in any given month, and she writes every one by hand, and she does not write the same thing twice.
That is the part that takes the time. Anybody can sign two hundred and sixty cards. She writes a line in each that is about the actual person, which means she has to know something about two hundred and sixty people, which means she has been quietly paying attention for nineteen years.
She knows the woman whose husband died in October, so she never sends that one anything cheerful in October, and she has never explained that to anybody.
She knows which teenager is embarrassed by cards and gets three words and no exclamation mark.
She knows the man who has never once acknowledged receiving one in eleven years and who, she found out by accident, keeps them.
Nineteen years. Call it four and a half thousand cards.
And here is the plain thing she has known for a long time and has never said out loud.
If she stopped, they would simply not happen. There would be no meeting about it. There would be no gap in the schedule where somebody noticed. Cards would stop arriving and every individual person would assume there had been a change in policy, and that would be that.
Plainly, what this is not
Let me get it said so you can hear the rest.
This page is not going to promise you that somebody will notice. I do not know that. You may do this another nineteen years and never be thanked for it properly, and neither of us would be surprised.
And it is not going to make you into a lesson. There is no paragraph coming where the quiet ones get held up as an example to the loud ones. That is just a person being put at the front of a different room and it is not what you need.
And it is not going to tell you that hidden work is worth more than visible work. It is not, and you would not believe it if I said so.
You are not being consoled here, and nothing on this page asks you to be pleased about being unnoticed. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this, in one sentence written to people who were tired, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman reconciled to being filler before He would speak to her.
Not unrighteous to forget
Here is the sentence, and the way it is constructed is the whole thing.
For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10
Read the shape of it, because it is not the shape you would expect.
He does not say God will remember. That would be a promise, and it would be a good one.
He says God is not unrighteous to forget. Which is a statement about what God would have to become in order for your work to be lost.
Forgetting it would be an injustice. That is the claim. Not an oversight, not a shame, not a pity. An injustice, and one He is incapable of.
That is a much stronger sentence than the one people usually quote, and it does not depend on anybody's warmth toward you at all.
You are doing work that God would have to be unrighteous in order to forget, and the writer put it in exactly those terms because he was writing to people who were tired. I am not stretching that. Hebrews 6:10 frames the forgetting as an injustice rather than a possibility, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman at a kitchen table on the first Saturday of the month.
Which ye have shewed toward his name
And notice the next clause, because it moves the address of the whole thing.
Which ye have shewed toward his name.
Not toward the congregation, though that is where it landed. Toward His name.
Which means the card you wrote to the woman in October, the one you kept carefully unhappy because you knew, was addressed somewhere else as well as to her. And it arrived there. And it was received there.
That is not a metaphor and it is not a soft way of saying she did not thank you. Hebrews is making a claim about where an act of love actually goes.
You have been sending four and a half thousand things to an address you did not put on the envelope, and every one of them arrived. The word says shewed toward his name in plain language, and the Spirit who searches all things has been at that kitchen table for nineteen years and has read every single line you wrote.
And do minister
One more clause, and it is easy to miss because it is three words.
And do minister. Present tense, tacked on the end.
The writer names the work they have done and then says, in effect, and are still doing. There is no suggestion that the past ones counted and the present ones are routine. It is one continuous thing and all of it is in view.
Which matters on a first Saturday when you are twenty-two cards in and your hand hurts and this is the ninth one where you have had to think of something true and specific.
You are in the middle of work that is entirely in view right now, this morning, not just in retrospect. That is Hebrews 6:10 in its own present tense, and the Spirit who was given to bear witness is not somewhere else while you are doing the twenty-second one.
So come back to the table, and the good pen, and the list, and the twenty-second card of the morning.
Your assessment was never wrong. If you stopped, they would stop, and there would be no meeting about it. That is an accurate reading of how a congregation of two hundred and sixty works and you are not being naive about anything.
The mistake is the step after it, where you took the absence of a meeting as the measure of whether the thing was necessary. That was never the measure. A room's capacity to notice has never once been the instrument God uses.
You are doing work that God would have to be unrighteous to forget, addressed toward His name, entirely in view right now. That is Hebrews 6:10 in its own construction, and 1 Corinthians 12:22 calling the parts nobody watches necessary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a written line into ground a woman can stand on at a kitchen table, and God has never counted anybody's work by whether a congregation registered it, and He has read every one of the four and a half thousand.
That is not something that changes next Saturday. It is one thing said out loud, in a kitchen, in full.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, at the table, at the sink, wherever you are sitting when you finish reading. Christ is in you and you are in Him, and that standing has been given to you rather than earned across four and a half thousand cards, which is exactly why a woman with a pen in her hand can speak like this. Scripture is the ground under it, the Holy Spirit is what makes it living rather than merely accurate, and how any of it unfolds from here is His to decide. What is being asked of you is one ordinary thing named out loud with no apology on the end. That is small enough for this morning, and it stands on the Name and not on how convinced you feel.
- Nineteen years of cards, you are not filler. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and a sentence framed that way is not encouragement, it is a statement about what God would have to be in order for it to be lost.
- Reading that says a thing nobody would hold a meeting about is a thing that does not matter, get out of this kitchen. The Holy Spirit has read every line I wrote and the word says the work was shown toward His name, and in the name of Jesus what I do is necessary and this body is short without it.
- Lord, You would have to be unrighteous to forget one of these, and You are not. I thank You, because every one of them arrived somewhere I never wrote on the envelope, and this morning I am writing the next one gladly.
Hebrews 6:10
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