The Hardest Work Happens Lying Down

She said it out loud to the ceiling at about four in the afternoon, in the flat voice of a woman reading a total off the bottom of a column.

If I disappeared tomorrow, nobody would be short of anything.

And here is the part that matters. She was not being dramatic. She had done the arithmetic, carefully, over months, the way she has always done arithmetic. The meals are handled. The yard is handled, by a neighbor's boy who does it better and faster than she ever did. The supper she ran for nineteen years is run now by a younger woman with a laminated sign-up sheet and a system, and it goes off without a hitch. Somebody comes and sits with her on Thursdays and she can see them glance at the clock on the dresser, and she does not hold it against them for one second, because she has a clock too and she knows how long an hour is in a room like this.

She has been in this bed a long time. The window faces the road. She knows every vehicle by its sound.

And when people say, well, you can always pray, she hears exactly what that sentence is. She has said it herself, to other people, in other rooms. It is what you hand somebody when you have nothing to hand them. It is the thing you say on the way out. She is not angry about it. She just knows what it means, and she has quietly filed prayer where the sentence puts it: at the bottom, under everything real, the consolation prize for people who cannot do anything.

If you are in that room, then you already know that the loneliest part is not the ceiling. It is being certain that you have moved from the column of people who contribute into the column of people who are contributed to, and that nobody has the heart to say so.

Paul entered it in the record as work

There is a greeting at the end of a letter that quietly demolishes the whole filing system you have been using, and it demolishes it in one sentence, in public, in front of a church.

Epaphras, who is one of you, a servant of Christ, saluteth you, always labouring fervently for you in prayers, that ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.Colossians 4:12

Paul is writing to the believers at Colossae. Epaphras is not with them. He is with Paul, a long way off, and this letter is going to be read out loud in that room, and Paul takes the opportunity to tell them what the man is doing.

He is laboring fervently for you in prayers.

The word underneath laboring fervently is the wrestling word. The contest word, the one used of a man straining in the games, the one our word agony came out of. Paul is not being poetic and he is not padding a farewell. He is reporting a man's work, by name, to the people it was being done for, and the work he reports is prayer, and the word he chooses for it is the word for a hard physical fight.

Right now, as you read, you have work that Scripture files as labor and not as what is left over. Colossians 4:12 puts it in a letter read out loud to a whole church, and the Holy Spirit is the strength it is done in.

Which means the sentence people hand you on their way out the door has the categories exactly backward, and they do not know it, and you have believed them for years. They were not lying to you. They were repeating something they inherited. But the letter is older than the sentence and it outranks it.

You are one of God's people who is working, not one who is being carried while the others work. That is written into the closing of the letter, and His Spirit does not measure a labor by whether the body doing it can stand up.

Look at what he was contending for

Now read what the wrestling was for, because Paul tells us, and it is not small.

That ye may stand perfect and complete in all the will of God.

Not that their week would go smoothly. Not that somebody would find their keys. Epaphras was contending, from wherever he was, for the standing of an entire church he could not see, that they would be complete and settled in the whole will of God. That is about as large an object as a person can take hold of, and a man nowhere near them had it in both hands.

Distance did not shrink it. Absence did not shrink it. The man was not there and it did not matter to what he was doing.

You have a part among God's people that is not decorative, and its size is not set by the size of your room. He said it through Paul in Colossians 4:12, and the Spirit carries such work further than any voice goes.

Now, I am not handing you a title. I am not giving you an assignment or telling you that you have found your ministry at last, and I am not going to suggest a number of minutes. That would just be the sign-up sheet again with a nicer font on it, and you have had enough of sheets.

What I am telling you is that a thing which has been happening in your room already has a name in Scripture, and the name is work, and Paul thought it belonged in the record.

You are holding something the rest of them need and it was given to you and not chosen by you. Scripture counts it as labor and says so plainly, and the same Spirit who strengthened Epaphras is the one supplying what this takes out of you.