The Room You Have Never Sat In

You know the songs. You just do not know how they end.

Two of them come through the wall every week, muffled, the bass more than the words, and by the time the second one is finishing you are already on the floor with the box, because the box has to be out before they come in and there is a specific order to it. Register on the clipboard. Squash poured but not handed out, because handing it out early is a decision a person only makes once. Glue sticks in the tub, all seven of them, none of which have had a lid since the spring.

You have a system that would not disgrace a small airport.

You know which child needs to be met at the door and walked in, and which one needs everybody to pretend not to notice him arriving. You know that the craft with the paper plates takes eleven minutes if you pre cut the shapes and thirty five if you do not. You know that the story goes better if you sit on the floor. You know the boy who tells you every single week, in enormous and unhurried detail, about a dog that belongs to his auntie, and you have heard about that dog for two years and you would fight anybody who tried to hurry him.

You know the sound of applause through a wall, with no idea what it was for.

You know the parents who arrive four minutes early and hover, and the ones who arrive twelve minutes late and are always so sorry, and you say every time that it is absolutely fine, and it is absolutely fine, and it costs you eleven minutes of your own morning every single week.

And you know the notice sheet, because the notice sheet is how you find out what the church has been learning about. Week three of a series on something in the Old Testament. You read the title in the car.

Here is where I stop smiling, because I have to say the next part plainly.

Fourteen years.

Fourteen years of Sundays, and you could not tell anybody what that other room feels like at the end of a service. You have never sat in it while the last song runs on and nobody is in a hurry. You have never had somebody put a hand on your shoulder during the quiet bit at the end. You do not know what it is like to be in there and not be responsible for anybody.

And nobody did this to you. That is the strange part. There is no villain in this story, no rota that trapped you, nobody who decided you were the sort who would not mind. You said yes, and then you said yes again, and you kept saying yes because you love those children and because the box has to come out before they come in.

You know the small room. Maybe yours is not the children's group. Maybe yours is the car park, or the sound desk, or the kitchen, or the two hours before anybody else arrives. Whatever your version is, you have given years to it, and it has never once occurred to you to be sad about it, and there is still something in your chest that goes quiet when you hear the applause through the wall.

He has never once mislaid a single one of those Sundays

Let me start with a verse that was written to people in exactly this position, and let it be as blunt as it is.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

That is a strange way to phrase a promise. Not "God will remember". God is not unrighteous to forget. It puts forgetting in the category of injustice, which means that overlooking fourteen years of a woman on a floor with a box would be a moral failure in God, and He does not have one of those.

You are held in a record that has never once dropped a line. Hebrews 6:10 calls it work and labor of love shown toward His name, which is a very grand way to describe seven lidless glue sticks and a very long story about a dog, and the Holy Spirit is the one who insists on the grandness when the woman doing it would call it nothing.

And notice who the audience is in that verse. Toward His name. Not toward the rota, not toward the leadership, not toward the parents at the door. The whole fourteen years has been running in one direction and it was never the direction of the applause through the wall.

Now, I want to be careful about something, because this is where an article like this usually goes wrong.

I am not about to tell you that your service is what makes you precious. That would be the cruellest thing I could write here, however warmly I dressed it. A person who is loved for their usefulness is not loved, they are employed, and God does not employ anybody.

You were loved before the first rota was ever printed, and the love has never been paid for by a Sunday. Scripture says we are accepted in the beloved, and accepted there is a word about position rather than performance, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a woman who has quietly assumed for years that she is the one who does the boxes.

The small room was never the lesser room

There is a moment where Jesus is talking about greatness, in the middle of a squabble about it, and He picks up a child and puts the child in front of everybody.

And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me.Matthew 18:5

Receiveth me. Not "does something quite valuable for me". Receives Him.

You have been receiving Christ Himself on that carpet every single week. Matthew 18:5 says that welcoming one child in His name is welcoming Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific, so that it is not a nice sentiment about children in general but that boy, in that room, with the dog story, this Sunday.

Which turns the whole geography of your Sunday morning upside down. There is a room where a hundred people are singing and there is a room where a woman is pouring squash, and Scripture is quite clear about who is in the second one.

And here is what He does with people who serve like that. He does not ask them for more.

Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.Mark 6:31

That is Jesus, to His own workers, in a season of genuine need, with the crowds still coming. He looked at people who had been giving out until they had not eaten, and He did not say the work was urgent. He said come away, and rest.

You have a Lord who notices when His servants have not eaten, and who says so first. Mark 6:31 has Him initiating the rest rather than waiting to be asked for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a woman permission to hear that without immediately arranging cover.

So this article is not going to ask you for anything. Not a single extra thing. If you want a Sunday in the other room, ask for one, and ask without a speech, and let somebody else be mediocre at the paper plates for a week. If you want to stay on that floor for another fourteen years because you love it there, stay, and stay gladly, and stop treating it as the room you are stuck in.