Necessary in the Rain

He is out there before anybody, in the yellow coat that has gone soft at the cuffs, walking the line of the wall with a bucket of grit if it is February and a broom if it is fall.

The gate sticks. It has stuck for eleven years and the fix is a particular lift and shove that he does without thinking and nobody else has ever learned. He waves the wide cars into the wide spaces. He keeps the two bays by the door clear, and he has had one conversation about that every single Sunday of his life, always pleasantly.

Then he stands at the far end where the puddle forms, and the rain comes across the tarmac sideways, and he hears the first song through the wall, muffled, the way you hear a song through a wall. He has heard the beginning of a great many services and the whole of hardly any.

At half past ten a woman on her way in says, cheerfully, "You still doing this, then." And he says, "Somebody's got to," and she laughs and goes in, and it was a kind thing to say and it cost him something he could not name.

Driving home he does the arithmetic he does most weeks. If he stopped, if he simply did not come, how long would it be? Not two weeks. There would be a few Sundays of chaos at the gate and somebody's wing mirror, and then somebody would improvise. He reckons a month.

And you have your own version of that arithmetic. Yours might be a schedule, a spreadsheet, a kettle, a phone call every Tuesday to a woman who does not remember your name. You are not fishing for anything. You would be mortified if anybody thought you were. You have simply run the numbers, more than once, and the answer keeps coming out the same.

The second thing, underneath the first

Let me name the weight, because there are two and only one of them ever gets said.

The first is being unseen, and everybody understands that one. The second is worse: it is minding about being unseen, and then being ashamed of minding, because a good person would not mind, and now the whole thing has to stay in the car where nobody can hear it. So a person ends up carrying the ache and a private verdict about themselves for having it.

Set that verdict down. It has nothing to do with vanity. It is what happens when somebody has never once been told whether what they do actually counts, and there is a whole chapter of the Bible written to answer that exact question.

On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable.1 Corinthians 12:22

Read what Paul does not say there. He does not say those parts are appreciated. He does not say God notices them even if nobody else does, though that is true. He says indispensable, and he says it in the middle of an argument about how a body physically works.

You have that word standing over what you do, and it is not a compliment being paid to you kindly. It is a structural statement in the written word about how the whole thing holds together, and the Holy Spirit did not inspire that sentence as a consolation for people at the back.

He is not saying the hidden parts are holier

And here is where this could go wrong, so let me stop it before it starts.

Paul is not building a league table with the invisible people at the top of it. That would just be the same disease with the order reversed, and the whole chapter exists to kill the disease. The visible parts are not less necessary either. A body is not a competition between its own limbs, and the moment anybody starts ranking, they have taken Paul's argument and turned it inside out.

But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as He chose.1 Corinthians 12:18

Each one of them. As He chose. That is a sentence about who did the arranging, and it was not the person who was short of volunteers eleven years ago, and it was not you either.

You were placed rather than absorbed. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says the placing was God's own act and His own choosing, and His Spirit is the one who distributes and arranges across a whole body. Being needed where nobody looks is not a lesser assignment. It is an assignment.

What this article cannot do for you

It cannot get you thanked. I want to be honest about that, because the last thing you need is another page that leaves you waiting for something.

Nobody may ever mention the gate. The kind woman at half past ten may say the same cheerful thing next Sunday. Recognition is not on offer here and I am not going to hint at it to make the ending feel better.

What is on offer is the difference between doing a thing that is tolerated and doing a thing that is necessary. Those two feel identical from the outside and they are not remotely the same to live inside. You have the second one. The written word settles it rather than anybody's attention, because the God who arranged the body said so about the parts nobody watches. The Spirit who put you there is not waiting to see whether the room catches up.