Everything Before 2019

The email said the migration was complete and that legacy records prior to 2019 had not been carried across.

That was the whole sentence. It was in the fourth paragraph, under a heading about improved search functionality, and about eleven people in that building read it properly.

Steph was one of them.

Nine years. The pricing model she built from nothing in a fortnight when the old one fell over. The forecast that got them through the bad autumn. Two hundred and something documents in a folder structure she had designed herself and which she was, privately, quite proud of, because it was good and it worked and people found things.

Gone. Not deleted maliciously. Just not carried, the way a house move leaves a shed at the bottom of a garden.

She sat at her desk for a while and then she went and made a coffee she did not want.

Marcus was in the kitchen. Marcus has been there longer than anybody and is unbothered by absolutely everything, and she told him, and he said, "Yeah. Same thing happened in 2011."

She said, "Does that not bother you?"

And he said, cheerfully, stirring, "I have never once thought a spreadsheet was going to outlive me."

And she said, "Then what is the point?"

And Marcus, who is not a philosopher and did not think he was saying anything, said, "Doing it right today. That is the job."

He went back to his desk.

And Steph stood in that kitchen with a coffee she did not want and thought: that is not enough. That is not enough and I do not know why it is not enough.

Now let me ask you your version.

It might be spreadsheets. It might be meals that get eaten, or a lawn that grows back, or a ward that empties and fills, or a house that has to be tidied again on Thursday because it was tidied on Monday.

Something in you keeps asking what any of it is for, and the honest answer people give you, doing it right today, is true and does not satisfy, and you have not been able to explain why.

I can explain why. And then I can tell you what actually answers it.

The reason the last verse is about work

Paul spends the whole of 1 Corinthians 15 on one subject, and it is not work. It is the resurrection. Fifty-seven verses on the risen Christ, the raised body, the last enemy, death swallowed up.

And then he lands the entire argument here.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that your toil is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

So hear this said over you, at the desk with the email still open. You have not lost nine years, and the permanence of your work was never a property of the file it was stored in. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is described as the one who will give life to your mortal body, which is the same power holding everything else you have spent.

Therefore. That is the most important word in the sentence. Everything about a raised Christ and a raised body, and the conclusion he draws from it is about your Tuesday.

Your toil is not in vain. The word he uses for toil is not the noble one. It is the word for wearying labor, the sort that leaves you tired, and he says that specific thing is not empty.

Now let me say why that is the answer and doing it right today is not.

Marcus is correct that a spreadsheet will not outlive him. What he cannot tell you is why the doing of it still matters, and without a resurrection there is no reason it should.

But if the dead are raised, then nothing is finally lost, because permanence is not a property of the artifact. It is a property of God's keeping. And a God who can raise a body out of the ground is not going to be defeated by a migration that did not carry a folder.

So hear this over you, at your desk. Your labor is not in vain, and the nine years were not carried by the system but they were carried, and the reason has nothing to do with whether anybody can open the file. That is written down and Paul builds an entire chapter to get there, and the Holy Spirit is described as the one who will give life to your mortal body, which is the same power that holds the rest of it.

Now let me guard this against the version that sounds spiritual and is a dodge.

I am not saying the work did not matter and only the people did. That is a very popular sentence and it quietly agrees that the work was worthless.

The pricing model mattered. It was good work, it held a company together in a bad autumn, and the fact that nobody can open it now does not retroactively make the fortnight you spent on it a waste, any more than a meal is wasted because it was eaten.

Work that is used up is not work that failed. It is work that was used.

Here is the thing your instinct has been reaching for. You do not actually want the spreadsheet to survive. You want to know that you were not spending yourself on nothing. Those are different requests and only the second one has an answer, and the answer is a Person who keeps what is spent.

The Word says God is not unjust so as to forget your work, and Paul says your toil is not in vain in the Lord, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes both of those off the page and settles them in a person on an afternoon when an email has just told them nine years did not come across.

There was a man five hundred years ago who said that if he knew the world would end tomorrow he would still plant a tree today. That is not a shrug about the future. It is the opposite. It is a man who believed the future was so securely in God's hands that today's ordinary work did not need to justify itself by surviving.