The Things Which Are Not Seen

Ten years. He did the sum on a train and has not been able to unthink it since.

Everything. Not most of it. Every single thing he has made in twenty two years of working will be switched off, replaced, or quietly stopped inside about a decade, and some of it already has been, and the pieces he was proudest of are among the ones that went first.

He is not depressed about this. He wants that clear, because when he tried to explain it to a friend the friend went into a kind of alert posture and started reassuring him, and he had to spend twenty minutes reassuring the friend back.

It is not despair. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic will not go away by being reassured.

What it has done is peculiar. He still works hard and he still cares about doing it well, and there is now a very thin layer of something under everything, a kind of translucent sheet, and through it every task looks slightly like a task on a thing that is going to be switched off.

He has not found any way to think about this that is not either a lie or a shrug.

You may have done your own sum. Not despair. A number, arrived at honestly, that has put a thin sheet under everything you do.

Both halves in one sentence

Here is a verse that people use badly, and I want to read it properly, because the careless version would insult you.

While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal.2 Corinthians 4:18

The things which are seen are temporal.

Notice that he does not say they are worthless. Temporal means time bound. It has a beginning and it has an end, and that is a description of duration rather than of value.

And notice what Paul was actually talking about in that chapter. He is describing his own body being worn out by work. The context is not a man dismissing physical things from a comfortable distance. It is a man whose own life and labor were visibly being used up, and he does not say that any of it did not matter.

You are working on things which are seen, and Scripture calls those time bound rather than pointless. 2 Corinthians 4:18 uses temporal as a word about duration rather than about worth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hold a true arithmetic without turning it into a shrug.

Now let me hold both halves, because both are true and most versions of this drop one.

Half one: your work is real. It does something for people right now, and it is doing it today, and the fact that it stops in ten years does not reach backwards and cancel what it does this afternoon. Nobody says a meal was pointless because it was eaten.

Half two: it will stop. All of it, probably faster than ten years for some of it. I am not going to promise you that any of it endures, and if I told you that one piece might survive you would recognize it as flattery.

You are neither building monuments nor wasting your life, and both of those are true at the same time. The written word looks at the unseen while never calling the seen worthless, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to pretend the sum is wrong.

Here is the thing that changes the shape. He says the things not seen are eternal, and in that chapter the unseen things are not buildings. They are what is happening in people, including in you. The one thing in your working life that is not on a ten year clock is what is being made in the man doing the work.

The honest half: that will not feel like enough on some afternoons, and I am not going to tell you it will. Some days the sheet will still be there.

There is a part only you can do and it holds both halves deliberately. You name one thing you made that will not last. And then you name one thing about yourself that will.