Four Across, Then The Aisle Row

There are a hundred and eight folding chairs in that fellowship hall and he stacks every one of them.

He has a way of doing it. Four across the front, then the aisle row, then back along the wall, ten to a rack and the racks pushed nose to tail against the stage so the floor is clear for the quilting on Tuesday. Then the tables get wiped. Then the trash. Then he turns off the light over the coffee urn last, because that one lights the door.

Twenty two minutes if nobody talks to him. Twenty six if somebody does.

He started the year his knee took him off the mowing crew, and that was eleven years ago in April.

In eleven years, not one person has ever mentioned it.

Not a thank you, which is fine. Not a word from the front, which he would have hated. But not once, in eleven years, in any hallway or any parking lot, has one human being said, out loud, somebody has been doing the chairs.

And he is not a man who needs to be thanked, and he would tell you that, and he would mean it.

But somewhere in about year eight he started noticing the not saying.

He noticed it the way you notice a truck running slightly off. Every Sunday driving home, twelve minutes of road, and by year ten he had done the arithmetic more than once about what would actually be different in that building if he stayed home.

Then this June he came in from the parking lot and somebody was already at it.

Young fellow, nineteen, works at the tire place out on the highway. Had about twenty chairs up already.

And he was doing it the man's way. Four across the front. Then the aisle row.

The man stood there in the doorway with a chair in each hand and said, "How'd you know to stack them like that?"

And the kid did not even look up.

"I've watched you do it since I was nine."

You know that hall.

Maybe it is not chairs. Maybe it is the coffee, or the nursery, or the bulletins nobody thanks anybody for, or the ride you have given the same person for six years, or the fact that you are simply there, in the fourth row, every single week. And nobody has ever said a word about it, and lately you have started running the numbers on whether the morning would be one bit different if your seat sat empty.

Consider one another

There is a line in Hebrews that is nine words long and it puts a job in the hands of ordinary people.

And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works.Hebrews 10:24

Look at the word provoke. It is not a soft word in Greek and it is not a soft word in English. It means to needle a man into something, to work on him until he moves.

Now look at who is doing it. Not the leadership. Not the platform. One another. That is a congregation of plain people, provoking each other into love and into good works by whatever it is they do in that building.

Which means the chairs were never maintenance.

You have been provoking somebody into good works for eleven years, and nobody ever had to tell you that you were. Hebrews 10:24 hands that job to one another rather than to anybody with a title, and 1 Corinthians 12:7 says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal, so what has been happening in that hall on Sunday afternoons was the Holy Spirit working through a man with a bad knee and a system for stacking chairs.

A nine year old was watching. For ten years. And nobody told him to.

That is the thing the silence was covering the whole time.

You are not unseen, and you have not been unseen for one Sunday of it. Hebrews 6:10 says 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 it is the Holy Spirit who has been carrying that work into places you were never told about.

Set, not seated

Here is the word that changes what a person is doing in a room.

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.1 Corinthians 12:18

Set. Not filed. Not slotted. Not allowed in.

And as it hath pleased him, which is the part that will not leave a man alone once he has seen it. God did not put you in that gathering because the numbers worked out. He put you there because it pleased Him to have you in that room, in that seat, in that hallway, at that urn.

That is not attendance. That is an appointment.

You are not filling a seat in that body, you were set into it on purpose. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God did the setting and that it pleased Him to do it, and it is the same Spirit who divides to every man severally as He will, so the thing you carry into that building is not a hobby you took up. It is an assignment nobody announced.

Now let me say what this is not, and say it plainly, because a message like this one can go sour in a hurry.

This is not a complaint dressed up as a comfort.

Nobody in that church did anything to you. The people up front are not at fault for not knowing, and the point of this is not that somebody owes you a mention, a title, a role, a place on a rotation or your name said from the front. If a word came tomorrow it would be nice and it would not add one thing to what is already true this afternoon.

And the honest answer to your arithmetic, since you asked it in the truck on the way home, is that yes, the chairs would get stacked by somebody.

That was never the question.

The question is whether the room would be the same room.

You have not been small in that building, and you were not small in it in year eight either. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget, which is a promise given in the negative because God knew exactly which fear His people would carry, and the Spirit who wrote it is the one who has kept the account.