It is running now. It has been running since he finished it and it will be running when he wakes up.
Somewhere, tonight, people he has never met are touching the thing he made. Not thinking about it. That is the whole point of it: if they think about it, something has gone wrong.
He has never seen one of them. Not one, in eleven years.
And the feeling that has arrived recently, and it is a strange one to describe, is not loneliness exactly. It is something more like being a rumor. His work is out there being used constantly and nobody using it has any idea a person made it, and if you spend long enough in that position it starts to feel as though the person is optional.
He is not asking to be thanked. He would find that mortifying. He has thought about it carefully and it is not gratitude he is missing.
It is that the whole thing happens with nobody watching. It runs at three in the morning, and at three in the morning he is asleep, and nobody is awake with it.
That is the shape of it, if he had to put it into a sentence. Not unthanked. Unwitnessed.
You may know that window. Something you made that is being used tonight by people who will never know your name, and a growing suspicion that usefulness without a witness is a slightly ghostly way to exist.
Somebody is awake with it
Here is a line about doing things where nobody can see, and it is not about being humble, it is about who else is in the room.
That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:4
Thy Father which seeth in secret.
Notice that it is not a description of God's abilities. It is a description of where He is. He is in the secret. He is not looking in from somewhere else, He is the One already present in the place nobody else is looking at.
Jesus says it about giving that nobody sees. But the phrase is doing something bigger than the example, and it is exactly your window: God's habitual location includes the places where things happen unwitnessed.
You are not working unwitnessed, and you have not been for eleven years. Matthew 6:4 puts the Father in the secret rather than outside it looking in, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about three in the morning rather than a general thought about God.
Let me stay with the thing that is actually bothering you, because you were precise about it and I want to honor that.
You did not say you wanted thanks. You said the work happens with nobody watching, and that this has begun to make you feel like a rumor. That is a real thing and it is not vanity, and I would not want you talked out of it as though it were.
Here is what Scripture puts against it. Not recognition. Presence. The claim is not that people will find out. The claim is that the room was never empty.
You have a Father who is in the secret with the thing you made. The written word locates Him inside the unseen rather than informed about it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man company in a place where by design nobody is looking.
The honest half, and I am not going to slide past it. Nobody is going to write to you. That is what your kind of work is and it is not going to change, and a message that hinted at eventual recognition would be selling you something it does not own.
And I am not going to inflate what you do into something world changing either. It is useful and it is quiet and that is enough, and puffing it up would be its own kind of insult.
There is a part only you can do and it is very small. One person, unnamed, who will touch your work tonight, spoken about to God in a single sentence. Not to make it count. To stop it being a room with nobody in it.
The room was never empty.
That is the correction, and notice that it is not the correction you would have asked for. You were not asking for an audience and you did not want thanks. You were describing a place where things happen with nobody there, and Scripture answers that specific description with a specific claim: He is in the secret.
You are seen in the exact place that has no other witness in it. Scripture says thy Father which seeth in secret and puts Him inside rather than outside, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is awake at three with the thing you made.
So nobody writes to you, because that is not what this kind of work does. And the night is not unattended.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the desk with the window dark. The standing to speak them is yours in Christ, delegated to you rather than achieved, which is why a man nobody will ever write to can speak with complete footing at half past eleven at night. Scripture is the ground under every line, the Holy Spirit makes it live, and whatever your work does out there is His to decide.
- Feeling of being a rumor, you are not the truth about what I made. Scripture says thy Father which seeth in secret, so the room where my work runs all night has never once been a room with nobody in it.
- Night that runs on without a witness, in the name of Jesus you are attended. The written word puts the Father inside the secret rather than informed about it, and the Holy Spirit has been awake at three in the morning with the thing I made every night for eleven years.
- Father, You see in secret and You are there with this tonight, and I am handing You the ones who will touch it. I thank You that Matthew 6:4 puts You in the unseen place rather than looking into it, and I am saying one sentence about a stranger now and going to bed.
Matthew 6:4
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