Where The Applause Cannot Follow

She could give you the list without thinking about it, which is part of the problem.

She led the appeal that got the building work finished. She started the thing on Wednesdays that now has sixty people in it. She has spoken at four conferences this year, and she is good at it, genuinely good, and people come up afterward and say things that she takes home and thinks about at eleven at night.

She works harder than almost anybody in that church. Nobody who says the next part is accusing her of laziness.

She was on a train, going to the fourth of those conferences, and she was doing the thing you do on trains, which is looking out of a window and not thinking on purpose, and a question arrived without being invited.

What have you done this year that nobody knows about?

She went through it. Properly, in order, the way she does everything.

And there was nothing. Not one thing. Every single act of service in an entire year had been done in a place where it was seen, counted, thanked, photographed or mentioned from a platform, and most of it by her own arrangement, because she is the one who runs the arrangements.

She is not a fraud and this is not a story about vanity. She meant all of it. Every hour of it was real work for real people.

It had simply never once cost her the thing that only a hidden hour costs, which is the small quiet death of not being seen doing it.

He is not threatening you. He is offering to be the audience.

Jesus says a thing about giving that gets read as a warning and is actually an invitation.

That thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:4

Hear that on the train. You are already seen by the audience that finally counts. The word says thy Father which seeth in secret, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a felt thing for somebody who has been running on full rooms.

Read who is watching.

The verse is not primarily about hiding. It is about the identity of the audience. He is saying: there is a Father who sees in secret, and He is enough of an audience, and you can do a thing in front of Him alone and it will not have been unwitnessed.

That is not a threat. That is an offer, made to people exhausted by performing.

And notice what it assumes: that there is a category of act available to you that has no human audience at all, and that this category is not a lesser one. It is the one He picked out to talk about.

So take this on your train, and know it is not my rebuke, it is what is written: you are seen right now, entirely, by the only audience that finally matters. His word says thy Father which seeth in secret, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a felt reality for a woman who has been running on rooms full of people for a decade.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds whose public life was enormous. Crowds in fields, a quarter of a million miles on horseback, a movement that changed a country.

And he spent an extraordinary amount of that life in prisons.

Not preaching to crowds in prisons. Sitting with individuals. Men in debtors' gaols, held for money they could not earn while held. People the night before they were hanged. He went back and back and back to rooms where there was no crowd, no report, no return, and nothing to show anybody afterward.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and where the warmth actually went was to the rooms nobody could see into.

You have the method. You have more method than nearly anybody. The question in this article is where the warmth is being spent, and the answer so far is: only where there is a window.