None Of It Counted

The moving blankets go in the van folded, always, because Gil Hollins learned the hard way that a blanket thrown in loose comes out as a knot, and a knot at seven in the morning in somebody's driveway costs you ten minutes and your good humor.

So he folds them. Four of them, on the tailgate, in the last of the light, while the streetlight at the end of the block comes on and thinks better of it and comes on again.

Today was Nita from the eleven o'clock service, up to a second floor place on Bergerac with no elevator and a stairwell that turns twice. A sleeper sofa. Nobody who has not carried a sleeper sofa up a turning stairwell has any idea what a sleeper sofa is.

Gil is fifty two. He has been doing this for eighteen years.

The van came first, secondhand, for hauling his own things, and then somebody at church needed a hand, and then it was just understood. He is in a group text he did not ask to be in. When somebody's kid comes home from school there is a phone number, and it is his.

Eighteen years of lifts. The end of a dresser. The top of a refrigerator. The bottom of a piano, which he will not do again. Airport runs at four in the morning. That whole winter with Kev, who kept calling at eleven at night and once at two, and Gil kept answering, and drove over, and sat in a parked car on Fenwick Street with the engine off, saying almost nothing, for months.

And here is what Gil thinks, standing at the tailgate folding the fourth blanket, and he has thought it before and he will not say it out loud to anybody:

None of it counted.

Not bitterly. He would not know how to be bitter about it. He is just doing the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is what it is.

Kev moved to Arizona and they text twice a year. The family he helped in the fall stopped coming to church by spring. Nita is lovely and Nita will be somewhere else inside two years, they always are. Nobody he ever hauled a couch for has, as far as he can tell, been changed by it in any direction. He is a van. He is a strong back that shows up. That is a real thing to be and he does not despise it.

But there is a difference between being useful and mattering, and Gil is fairly sure he knows which side of that line he has spent eighteen years on.

He closes the doors. The latch on the left one needs a shove. He shoves it.

Then he stands in his own driveway a while with his hands on his hips and his back telling him about the stairwell, and the streetlight finally settles, and there is nobody there to say anything to him and nothing in particular he would say.

The smallest thing in the Bible is on the record

At the end of a long, hard chapter, Jesus finishes sending the twelve out. He has told them about being handed over and about households divided and about taking up a cross, and it is heavy going, and then, at the very end, He does something odd.

He goes small. Deliberately, all the way down.

He talks about receiving a prophet and a righteous man, and then he drops past both of them to the smallest act he can think of. A cup of cold water. Given to one of these little ones. Only a cup of cold water.

And you have to know what cold water was. There was no tap. Cold water in that country meant somebody walked to the well or the cistern in the heat and carried it back, and cold meant fresh, meant recently fetched, meant effort that nobody would ever hear about. It is the exact scale of a folded blanket.

Then Jesus says the thing.

You are not standing at the bottom of a scale where small things get lost, because Scripture put the smallest possible act on the record and left it there. I am not comforting you. Matthew 10:42 uses the strongest negative construction the language has, translated in no wise, a double no, and the Holy Spirit does not water that down somewhere between the page and a driveway at dusk.

And whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward.Matthew 10:42

Read the middle of it. In the name of a disciple. That is not a formula and it does not mean he said something religious while handing over the cup. It means he did it as one who belongs to Jesus, which he does whether or not it ever comes up in conversation.

Gil has never once said anything about God on a stairwell. He would not know where to put it. He is not going to start.

It changes nothing about the record.

You have carried cold water up other people's stairs for eighteen years, and the written word has been keeping it in a book you were never handed. Matthew 10:42 puts the reward beyond loss, in writing, in the mouth of Jesus Himself. What the Spirit adds is not enthusiasm. He simply refuses to let a man do his own audit with a set of scales that were never the right ones.

Counted is not a word you get to use

Here is the trouble with the sentence none of it counted.

Counting requires a record. A record requires a keeper. And Gil, standing at the tailgate, has quietly appointed himself the keeper of a record he has no access to, and then read out a total.

What did he actually count? What he could see. Kev in Arizona. The family who stopped coming. Nita, who will move. He counted visible outcomes over eighteen years and got a low number, and the number is honest as far as it goes, and it is measuring the wrong thing entirely.

There is a line in Hebrews that is almost brusque about this. God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love. Not unrighteous. It is put as a matter of God's own character: forgetting what you did would be a wrong, and He does not do wrong.

You were never forgotten, and no stretch of years and no silence and no move to Arizona put a single thing outside that. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and it is written that flatly. The Spirit's part in this is not to make you feel better about it. It is to point out that the forgetting you have assumed was happening has not, in fact, been happening.

Now I have to be careful with you, because this is exactly where a piece like this usually cheats.

I am not going to tell you that somebody is out there right now who was changed by your van. I do not know that. Nobody writing this knows that, and inventing a result to warm you up would be a lie told to a good man in his own driveway, and you would smell it.

And I am not going to promise you that you will ever be told. That is not on offer here and it is not what the verse says. The verse says the reward is not lost. It says nothing at all about a report reaching you.

And the not knowing is not a test. It is not God developing something in you by withholding the news. It is simply that the record is kept somewhere you do not have a login, which was the arrangement from the start and is not a comment on you.

You are inside an accounting you cannot audit, and it is already settled, and it was settled every single time before you got back in the van. Matthew 10:42 handles the valuing and never once hands the book to the one being valued. His Spirit is content with that arrangement, and He is not asking you to like it, only to stop keeping a second set of books against it.