Sixteen Years And Never Heard

The last one out is a girl in a yellow raincoat who has to come back twice, once for her water bottle and once for a drawing she cannot leave without.

Then the hall is empty, and it is twenty past eight on a Thursday.

Maureen stacks the chairs the way she has stacked them for sixteen years, six to a stack because seven is too heavy to move and five is a waste of a trip. The cart squeaks going across the floor and it has squeaked since before she started.

The crate goes on the second shelf. Markers, mostly dry. The felt board. The parachute, which has to be folded a particular way or the corner tears. The little plastic sheep, one of which has had a chewed leg for so long that the children who chewed it now have children of their own.

That is the thing that gets her tonight, and she is not sure why it is tonight and not any other night.

She has been doing this since some of these kids' parents were sitting on this same floor. Sixteen years of Thursdays. Snack, story, song, the game with the beanbags, hand them all back at the door.

And she does not know what happened to a single one of them.

Not one. Not one letter. Nobody has come back through that door as a grown person, and nobody has telephoned, and nobody has stopped her at the grocery store.

She remembers Dwayne, who came for two years and asked more questions than any child she ever had in this hall, real questions, hard ones, the kind that made her go home and look things up. His family moved away in the spring, eleven years ago. She has no idea where.

She remembers a girl called Sasha who cried at the story about the lost sheep and would not say why, and would not be comforted either, and just sat with her chin on her knees until the singing started.

And she remembers a boy whose name she has honestly lost, who spent the whole first year sitting under the trestle table during the songs and came out only for the snack, and then one week sat on a chair like it was nothing, and never went back under.

Three of hundreds. She could not name most of them if you paid her.

She puts the last stack against the wall, gets her coat off the hook by the kitchen hatch, and turns for the door.

The lock is stiff. It has always been stiff. You have to lift the handle and pull toward you at the same time, and everybody who has ever had a key to this hall knows it, and nobody has ever fixed it.

She lifts the handle. She pulls. It goes.

Standing there half in and half out with the cold coming in around her, she says it out loud to the room behind her, and there is nobody in it.

"Sixteen years. And I have never heard a thing."

The verb that was never yours

There is a line of Paul's that people read as humility, and it is not humility. It is a division of labor, and he is being very exact about who did what.

He is writing into an argument. The church at Corinth had split itself into camps over which teacher they belonged to, and Paul takes the whole thing apart in one sentence.

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.1 Corinthians 3:6

Three verbs. Two of them are human, and both of those are in the past tense, and both are finished. The third one belongs to God, and it is the only one in the sentence that made anything actually happen.

Now notice something Paul does not bother to mention, because it never occurred to him that anybody would need it mentioned. Neither he nor Apollos was standing in that field when it grew.

They were not there. They were in other cities, doing other things, and probably not thinking about it. The growing did not consult either of them, and it did not send them a note afterward, and Paul does not seem to consider that a problem worth addressing.

You are one of the ones who watered, and the watering is a finished thing whether or not you are ever told what came up. 1 Corinthians 3:6 divides those verbs and then keeps them divided, in writing, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked a person who watered to also be the one who audits.

And the third verb is the one to put your weight on.

You have God's own word for it that He gave the increase, and that verb is not sitting in the future waiting on conditions. The written word says God made it grow, not that He might have, and the Spirit is not holding that sentence open pending a report from anybody in your town.

The silence is not a curriculum

I want to be careful here, because there is a comforting thing people say to someone in your position, and it does real damage.

The thing people say is that God is keeping you in the dark on purpose, to teach you something. To grow your faith. To keep you humble. To make sure you are doing it for the right reasons.

I am not going to say that to you, because I do not think it is true and I know it is not in the text.

Nothing in 1 Corinthians 3 turns the not-being-told into a lesson. Paul does not say Apollos was denied the follow-up for his own good. There is no theology of withheld news anywhere in that chapter, and there is not one in the rest of the book either. Most of the time, a person does not hear what happened for the flattest reasons in the world: families move, decades pass, children grow up and do not think to write, and adults are shy about walking back into a hall they last stood in at nine years old.

That is not a message from heaven. That is distance and time.

You are not owed a report and you were never issued one, and that has no bearing at all on what happened in the ground. 1 Corinthians 3:6 puts the growing in God's hands and says nothing whatsoever about who gets informed, and the Spirit is not withholding news from you as an exercise.

And here is the second thing I am not going to do, and I want to name it plainly so you can trust the rest.

I am not going to promise you that you will be told. Not one day, not at a funeral, not in a letter that arrives out of nowhere. I do not know, and I am not going to hand you a hope with a mechanism attached to it, because a promise like that would be mine and not God's, and when it did not come you would quietly file it against Him.

What I will tell you is what the verse already settles, which is a different thing and a better one.

You have already done the thing that was actually yours to do, sixteen years of Thursdays, and it is finished work. That is what the written word means by planted and watered, both of them past tense, both of them complete, and the Spirit is not standing in an empty hall asking you for a follow-up.