It Already Reached Somebody

The hospital radio studio is a converted store cupboard on the second floor with a fire door that has to be wedged and a desk with one fader that crackles. Somebody has taped a note to the wall about the kettle. The other volunteer is doing the sport in twenty minutes and is eating his sandwich standing up, and a porter puts his head round the door to say the lift is out again.

She reads the request slips. Bay four for a lady who has been in nine days and would like anything by Nat King Cole. Somebody's grandad on the ward upstairs, ninety on Thursday. A woman who wrote for my husband, he cannot hear very well, so say his name slowly. She says his name slowly. She always does.

Fourteen years of Tuesdays she has been doing this. The switchboard rings maybe twice a month. Once a nurse said thanks in the corridor. That is the whole tally, and tonight, driving out past the barrier, the sentence that has been circling for a while finally lands and stays: as far as I can tell, none of it ever reached anybody.

I think you have your own version of that. The prayers said over a name for eleven years with nothing to point at. The kindness done at a checkout, the meals taken round, the years of doing a quiet thing well in a place nobody looks at, and no way whatever of knowing whether one bit of it landed. Stay in the parking lot a minute before you go. What is missing is not the effect. What is missing is the report, and those are two entirely different things.

The evidence was never the point

Let me name the ache properly first, because it is not vanity and I will not have it treated as vanity.

Nobody doing a hidden thing for fourteen years is asking for a plaque. What a person wants, and it is a good want, is to know that it mattered. Wanting to know is not pride. It is what love is like when it has been pouring out into silence for a long time and has no way of checking the level.

But look at the image the Bible actually uses for what you carry, because it is not a spotlight.

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of Him everywhere.2 Corinthians 2:14

Fragrance. Of all the pictures available, the one Paul reaches for is the one you cannot see, cannot aim, cannot count and cannot switch off. You do not stand in a room deciding how far the smell of bread has gone. By the time you wonder, it is already in the corridor.

So take this plainly, and take it as a fact rather than a hope. You are carrying something that has already reached people, and it did so without your permission and without a receipt. That is not my flattering opinion of your Tuesdays. It is what is written in 2 Corinthians 2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who spreads it, which is precisely why the spread was never yours to measure.

And there is a second picture, and it is the one that answers the not knowing.

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how.Mark 4:26 and 27

He knows not how. Jesus put that phrase in on purpose. The man in the story is not negligent and he is not lazy, he is asleep, and the growing happens anyway, in the dark, in soil he cannot see into. You were never given the job of watching it come up. The written word says the seed grows while the sower sleeps, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work down there, which is exactly why you were not issued with a window.

Which means the not-knowing is not a verdict on you. It is simply the shape of the work. A person who bakes at four in the morning does not get a list of everybody who walked past the door and felt hungry, and the absence of the list has never once meant the absence of the bread.

Hear that carefully, because there is a lie that lives in this exact spot. The lie says: if it had really been anything, you would have heard by now. That is not how fragrance works and it is not how God works. The word says the knowledge of Him is spread through people in every place, and His Spirit does the carrying, and He has never once been obliged to file a report back to the jar.

I am not going to hand you a technique here, and I am not going to ask you to do more of it. There is nothing to start. What there is, is a mouth, and a thing you are allowed to say out loud with it.

The measure of faith needed to speak is smaller than the crackle in that fader. Jesus put it at a seed in Matthew 17:20, and the point was never the quantity, it was that somebody opens their mouth and speaks to the thing in the way. What is in your way is a sentence: none of it reached anybody. You have the standing to speak to that sentence, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and He appointed speaking as the way this works. The Holy Spirit is the power in it. Your volume has nothing to do with it, and neither does how convinced you sound to yourself while you say it.

So put the missing report down where it belongs, outside the question. You are not waiting to find out whether it worked. 2 Corinthians 2:14 says God always causes us to triumph and makes the fragrance of His knowledge known through us in every place, written as a continuous fact about His doing. What the Spirit adds is that "every place" already included the ward you cannot see into.