A Cup Of Cold Water Only

Their bit is small. They would say tiny and they would not be fishing.

There is a large thing that gets made, and it does reach people, and they are aware of that and glad about it. And their part in it is one specific narrow function that takes a few hours a week and could probably be described in one sentence to somebody who did not know the trade.

They have done it for six years and they are good at it.

And somewhere in there it stopped counting as reach.

Not dramatically. Nobody said anything. It is simply that when they think about the people at the far end, they cannot draw a line from their few hours to any of them that does not look faintly ridiculous when they say it out loud. The line goes through so many other people's work that theirs disappears somewhere in the middle of it.

So they have quietly stopped including themselves in the story of what the thing does.

They still do it well. That has not changed. What has gone is any sense that it goes anywhere, and what that produces is not laziness, it is a low flat hum where meaning used to be.

You may have your own few hours. A part so small in the whole that you have stopped putting yourself in the sentence about who it reaches.

He left the word only in

Here is a sentence of Christ's, and the word I want you to notice is a very small one that most translations keep because it is doing something.

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

A cup of cold water only.

He puts the word only in Himself. He is not describing an impressive act and He does not want you to think He is. He picks the smallest imaginable thing a person could do for another person, names it as small on purpose, and then says it will in no wise lose its reward.

In no wise is emphatic. It is not a shrug of acceptance. It is the strongest form of the negative available.

You are doing something Christ Himself scaled down and then guaranteed. Matthew 10:42 keeps the word only and puts the strongest possible negative behind it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a person whose part takes a few hours a week.

Now let me name what has actually happened to you, because you were precise about it and it deserves a precise answer.

You did not conclude that your work is worthless. You concluded that you cannot trace a line from it to a person, and then you quietly resigned from the story. Those are different and only the second one is a decision.

And the reason the line looks ridiculous is that you are trying to trace causation through a system with dozens of people in it, which nobody can do for anything. Nobody who has ever worked on anything large can draw that line. The line is not available to any of them either.

Christ does not draw the line either. He does not say the cup of water will have great consequences. He says it will not lose its reward, which is an entirely different claim and does not depend on tracing anything.

You are counted in without the line having to be drawn. The written word attaches the promise to the act rather than to its traceable effect, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for you to prove a chain of causation before He counts you in.

The honest half: your few hours will go on being invisible inside the whole and nobody is going to single them out, and I am not going to inflate what you do into something world changing, because you would hear that immediately and rightly stop listening.

The correction is not that your part is bigger than you thought. It is that the size was never what determined whether it counted.

There is a part only you can do, and it is oddly hard. Say the smallest true description of your part out loud. And then do not add anything after it. The adding is where you have been going wrong.