Twenty Years in Your Own Handwriting

The second drawer sticks. You have to lift it slightly and pull, and everybody else in the building has given up on that drawer, and you can open it one handed while holding a mug.

Inside is the register, and beside it the tin with the good biros in, and behind that the box files going back along the shelf by year, which is the closest thing this congregation has to a memory.

You do the numbers after the gathering, standing up, with the book on the corner of the table because sitting down would make it a whole occasion. Adults, children, visitors. You have a way of counting a room in one sweep that you developed at some point and never told anybody about, and you are accurate to within one, and the one is always somebody who went out to the kitchen at the wrong moment.

Then the annual return, which is a fortnight of your life every year that nobody has ever noticed happening.

The extraordinary part, and you would never call it extraordinary out loud, is what those pages actually hold. You can look at a column of figures from a wet March and tell me exactly what was going on in this church that month. There is a note in the margin from the year the roof was done. There is the fortnight when the numbers halved and everybody had that flu. Your own handwriting changes across the twenty years, and there are three or four pages where it goes very neat and careful, and you know precisely why, because that was the season your family was going through the thing your family was going through, and the neat handwriting was you holding on.

Twenty years of a whole community's history, kept in one hand, in a book, in a drawer that sticks.

And then somebody new asks who you are.

And a kind person answers, entirely accurately and with real affection, that you are the one who does the records.

You know this one. Not because anybody was unkind, because nobody was. It is that the sentence is true, and it is complete, and there is nothing wrong with it, and it is the whole of what most of that building could say about you if they were asked. Twenty years of writing down other people's lives, and to almost everybody in the room, you are a name in a file.

The season that book was written in

I want to take you to a passage that was written for precisely this, and I mean precisely.

Near the end of Malachi, God quotes back to His people something they had been saying about Him. Their words were that it is vain to serve God, and what profit is it that we have kept His ordinance. That is not the language of people who had walked away. That is the language of people still doing it, still keeping it, still turning up and still filing the returns, and quietly wondering out loud what any of it was adding up to.

And in the very next breath, the text says that those who feared the Lord spoke often one to another, and the Lord hearkened and heard, and a book of remembrance was written before Him for them that feared the Lord and thought upon His name.

Read where that book appears. It is written in the season of feeling unrecorded. Not afterwards, when everybody had cheered up. Right there, in the middle of the season when the people keeping the ordinances could not see the point.

You are already written into a book that was opened for exactly this feeling. Malachi 3:16 puts a book of remembrance before God in the season when the faithful were saying it was vain, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that from a page in a minor prophet and lays it on a life in a small office with a sticking drawer.

Notice what God's register records, too, because it is not what a register normally records. It does not say a book of works was written, or a book of hours, or a book of duties discharged. It says those who feared the Lord and thought upon His name. What He wrote down was who they were and what they turned over in their minds when nobody was listening.

You have been recorded for what you think about, not for what you have processed. His word says the book was written for them that thought upon His name, and the Holy Spirit is the one witness who has been in the room for every unpaid fortnight of that annual return.

Then they that feared the LORD spake often one to another: and the LORD hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name.Malachi 3:16

Being useful and being known are two different things

Now the part underneath the sentence about the records, which I doubt has ever been put into words, because people in this position generally do not.

Tiredness of the work is not what this is, and that is the first thing to say clearly. The counting, the return, the box files: none of that is a burden anybody is asking to have lifted, and if somebody offered to take it away tomorrow the feeling would be closer to loss than relief. The work is not the problem.

The problem is that being reliably useful is a very effective way to be permanently unknown. It happens by accident and everybody colludes in it, including you. There is always a task in your hands at the moment when a conversation might have started. You are the one standing up at the corner table with a book. Twenty years of that and a congregation genuinely does not know how to ask you anything except about the numbers, and it is nobody's fault, and it is lonely.

You were known long before you were useful, and the two have never once been the same file. Scripture says the Lord knew you before He formed you, and the Holy Spirit did not come into a person on the strength of an annual return that nobody reads.

So let me say the thing that this category exists to say, and let me say it without a single hook in it.

If you stopped tomorrow, you would not lose one ounce of your standing with God. Not one. There is no ledger anywhere in heaven in which your name is entered against your usefulness, and if the drawer were emptied and the register handed to somebody else next month, the book of remembrance would not need a single amendment. Nothing here is asking you for more. I am not going to end this by suggesting a rota you could also join.

You have a place that is not paid for by service and cannot be lost by stopping. It is written that we are accepted in the Beloved, and the Holy Spirit was given as the seal on that acceptance, before any of us had filed anything.