Fifty Years And Nobody Will Ever Know

Roughly one a week since she was twenty eight, which she worked out on the back of an envelope in March and then threw the envelope away.

She has never told a soul. Not her husband, who was a good man and would have been glad, not her children, not one minister across five decades and four churches. There was never a decision to keep it quiet. It just never seemed like a thing you would mention, in the way that you would not mention brushing your teeth.

And now she is seventy eight, and something has come on her in the last eighteen months that she does not know what to do with.

She wants somebody to know.

Not everybody. Not a mention from the front. One person, before she dies, who could say that they knew about it, so that the whole of it did not simply stop existing on the day she does. That is the shape of the wanting, and it arrives most often in the afternoon, and every single time it arrives she is ashamed of it.

Fifty years of doing it properly and hidden, and she is going to finish by spoiling it with vanity in the last stretch. That is what she thinks is happening.

If you kept yours hidden and have started wanting to be known, come and sit on the boards. Nobody who ever spoke about their work publicly is going to be criticized here.

The wanting is not vanity

Let us look at what she actually wants, because she has filed it under the wrong heading and the heading is doing the damage.

She does not want admiration. Test it: a compliment about it would make her want the floor to open. What she wants is for the thing to have been witnessed. For it to exist somewhere outside her own head after she stops.

That is not vanity. That is a very old and very ordinary human need, and it is the reason people keep photographs and carve names into stone, and it is not the same as wanting applause. She has run fifty years without ever needing to be admired and has not suddenly acquired the appetite at seventy eight.

You have not spoiled it. Nothing about wanting to be known has ever canceled fifty years of not being. I am not saying it to be kind to an old woman. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love (Hebrews 6:10), which addresses precisely the fear that a hidden thing goes unrecorded, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold on a porch in the afternoon.

The verse written for exactly this fear

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody who works in public.

Read the strange construction, because it is not phrased the way you would expect a comfort to be phrased.

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

Not unrighteous to forget. That is a double negative doing precise work: forgetting is not merely unlikely, it is put in the category of things that would be unjust, and therefore not something He does.

So the record is not a favor being asked. It is a matter of His righteousness, already settled. And notice the verse says work and labor of love, which is a phrase for effort that nobody paid for and nobody watched.

Your record is already kept as a matter of His righteousness, and Scripture makes forgetting it the thing that would be unjust. That is written into the construction itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman with an envelope she threw away.

Nobody who works publicly is being praised or blamed

Something must be said very plainly, or this becomes a page about how hidden work is the superior kind.

It is not. The people who speak about what they do, who write it down, who have their work known, are not less faithful than she is. Some of them were told to, some had no choice, and hiddenness is a circumstance rather than an achievement.

And there is no rule anywhere that she has broken by keeping quiet, or would break by telling somebody. Fifty years of silence was not a vow. If she wants one person to know before she dies, that is not a failure of anything.

You do not need a platform for this to be real. It was given to you, not to an audience. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the profit is of people and the recording is left to God, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a witness she can arrange, who holds fifty years.

And if these eighteen months have cost more than the neighbors on that porch know, if sleep has gone, if the afternoons have started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.