Eleven Years and Never the Last Ten Minutes

You could write a book of opening stories.

Eleven years of them. The one about the man on the airplane. The one about the builder and the spirit level. The one about the dog, which was told three times by three different people who each thought it was theirs, and you never said anything, because what would be the point. You know the shape of an opening the way a cabbie knows a ring road. Anecdote, laugh, one line that turns, and then the first point.

And you have never heard how a single one of them ends.

The urn takes eleven minutes to come back up to temperature, and it has to be on before the last song finishes or there is a queue out the door and the whole thing collapses. Which means you get up somewhere around the third point, in that little lull where somebody is finding a verse, and you go down the side of the hall at the particular half crouch that is universal to all people leaving a room during a talk. The back kitchen. Urn on. Milk out. Two hundred and forty grams of coffee, which you have measured by eye since about year four. The mugs in rows, handles all the same way, because when forty people arrive at once the handles matter.

Then you stand there with your hand near the tap, and through the wall you hear the voice go up slightly, which is what a voice does when it is landing something, and then the room goes quiet, and then there is a prayer, and then the noise of everybody standing.

Eleven years. Every beginning. Not one ending.

You are not bitter about it. This is important and it needs saying early, because you can hear where this might be going and it is not going there. You like doing it. You are good at it. You know that the woman who comes on her own takes it black with one, and you have it ready before she reaches the table, and the fact that you know that is not nothing, and it is not a small ministry, and nobody has to tell you that.

But here is the thing you have never said to anybody, including your wife, and you would find it hard to say now.

You do not know whether you have grown in eleven years. You genuinely do not know. You have heard eleven years of introductions and you could not tell anybody what was actually said in that building in the last decade, and there is a low, quiet worry underneath that, which is that you might be running on what you knew in your thirties. And there is a second worry underneath the first one, which is worse, and it is this: you are not sure that anybody would notice if you stopped, and you are not sure what would be left of your place here if you did.

You know the back kitchen.

Somebody has been keeping the record

Let me start with the sentence I would want said to me, and then let us look at where it comes from.

Eleven years of anything, done quietly, with nobody counting, is a very long time. And the reason it wears is not the work. Making coffee is not hard. What wears is doing something for a decade in a building full of people who are genuinely fond of you and none of whom could tell you what the last eleven years cost, because there is no way for them to know. Faithfulness that nobody can see is not less real. It is only lonelier.

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 what that verse is doing. It is not a compliment. It is a statement about God's character, put in the negative on purpose, because the writer knew exactly what the reader was afraid of. The fear is that it went unrecorded. The answer is that God would have to be unrighteous for that to happen, and He is not.

You have not been overlooked by the only one keeping a record that matters. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget the work and labor of love shown toward His name, and it puts the guarantee on His character rather than on anybody's memory in that hall. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes that sentence and reads it out over a man standing next to an urn in a back kitchen with the door shut.

And notice the last three words of that verse: and do minister. Present tense. The writer is not congratulating somebody on a finished career. He is talking about a person who is still at it this week, mid stream, with no ending in sight.

You are in the middle of something Scripture speaks about in the present tense. The written word says ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister, which puts a person still doing it inside the promise rather than waiting at the end of it for a verdict. The Holy Spirit does not run a scheme where the reward arrives only once somebody notices.

What you have actually been missing

Now let me take the other worry seriously, because it deserves better than reassurance.

The worry is not really about coffee. It is about whether eleven years of missed endings have quietly starved something. That is a fair question and I am not going to wave it away with a line about how serving is its own sermon, because that line is usually said by people who are sitting down.

So, two things, and the first one is practical.

The last ten minutes of a talk is not the only place teaching lives. It is one place, and it is a good place, and if it is genuinely possible for somebody else to take a fortnight on the urn, that is a completely legitimate thing to ask for and nobody in this article is going to make you feel selfish for asking. It is also completely legitimate not to ask. Neither of those is the point, and neither of them decides anything about you.

Because here is the second thing, and it is the one that actually answers the worry.

Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.Colossians 3:23

You are serving a Person, and He has been in the back kitchen the entire eleven years. Scripture says plainly that the serving is unto the Lord and not unto men, which relocates the whole transaction out of a building full of people who could not possibly know. The Holy Spirit has not been in the main hall for the good bit and absent from the room with the mugs in it.

And on the question of whether you have grown: growth is not measured in talks heard, and it never was. A man who has spent eleven years learning which person takes it black with one, and having it in his hand before she reaches the table, has been learning something that the last ten minutes of a talk cannot teach anybody. That is not a consolation prize. That is the actual curriculum.

You have a Teacher who does not require you to be in the right room at the right minute. His word says the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, shall teach you all things, and John 14:26 puts that teaching inside a person rather than inside a schedule. The Holy Spirit has been teaching a man beside an urn for eleven years, and nothing about a half crouch down the side aisle has ever interrupted Him.