The Matting Under the Slide

The noise in a soft play center on a Saturday is not really noise. It is weather. It comes at you in one continuous sheet and after ten minutes you stop hearing individual children in it at all.

He is on the low bench along the wall with four coats on his knees and a paper cup of squash he is holding for somebody who has not come back for it. There is a wristband on his arm, blue, cutting slightly. Somewhere behind him a woman is explaining to a small boy that socks are compulsory.

It is a fourth birthday. He is not unhappy. He is flat in the specific way of a person who has been doing something well for fifteen years and cannot remember the last time it felt like it was for anyone.

Then a child comes off the yellow slide far too fast, sideways, with both arms out, and lands hard on the matting at the bottom and lies there for one long second while every adult in the room prepares to move. And then she gets up laughing and runs straight back round to do it again.

And he finds himself looking at the matting.

Because somebody chose that. Somebody, in a room somewhere, worked out the thickness of it and how much it should give and what it should be made of, and argued about the cost of it with somebody else, and then went home. And that person has never met this child. Will never meet her. Will never know that on a Saturday in a town they have never been to, a girl in odd socks came off a slide wrong and got up laughing because of a decision they made years ago at a desk.

That thought puts a hole in his afternoon, because he knows exactly where it is going.

You know too. You are the one at the other end of something. It ran all night while you were asleep. It will run all night tonight. Thousands of people have put their hands on the thing you made and not one of them has ever said your name, and most days that is simply a fact, and on the bad ones it is a small cold room you cannot get out of.

Somebody is at the far side of it

Here is the first thing, and it is not a comfort, it is a fact about God.

The Lord looks down from heaven; He sees all the children of man. From where He sits enthroned He looks out on all the inhabitants of the earth, He who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds.Psalm 33:13-15

Read the scale of that and then read the detail of it in the same breath. All the inhabitants of the earth, and He fashions the hearts of every single one. Not a crowd. Not traffic. Hearts, one at a time, each one made.

So the person at the other end of what you made this week is not an abstraction to God. He knows what happened in their kitchen this morning. He knows what they were dreading when they picked the thing up.

You are working in front of a God who is already looking at every person your work will reach. I am not decorating your job for you. The written word puts Him on the throne watching individual people rather than statistics, and it is His Spirit who makes that something a person can rest in instead of merely agreeing with. Nobody at the far end of your work is unseen, even if every one of them is unseen by you.

What you are actually short of

Let me name it accurately, because I think it has been going under the wrong name for years.

You have been calling it meaning. I do not think it is. You know perfectly well that the work is useful, and you would not swap it. What you are short of is the loop closing. Human beings are built to make a thing and then watch a face receive it, and your trade snapped that loop in half and asked you to carry on without it. That is a real deprivation and it is not vanity to feel it.

You have not been unreasonable, and the ache you have been embarrassed about is an honest one. Scripture is full of God noticing hidden work, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a person steady in a place where no face ever comes back. Wanting to see the other end of your own hands is not pride. It is how a maker is made.

But the loop was never the thing that made the work count. It only ever felt like it, because it is the part we can feel.

Two things a maker has to settle

The first is that God still receives ordinary work. Not received, historically, when it was tabernacle curtains and a man was filled with the Spirit to do metalwork. Receives. Now, this week, from a person whose craft did not exist a hundred years ago.

The second is that He receives this one. Yours. The thing you did on Tuesday that nobody reviewed and nobody thanked you for.

You have work in front of you today that counts before anybody says a word about it. The word says whatever you do, do it heartily, as for the Lord and not for people, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a piece of work from a desk to God without needing it to be announced first. The counting happens at His end. It has already happened.

And the mountain here is not the anonymity. It is the sentence you have quietly accepted, that work nobody thanks you for did not really happen. Jesus put the moving of a mountain on the mouth rather than on the strength of the person speaking. So the thing to speak to is the sentence.