Forty-One Years of Dinners

Della did forty-one years in that kitchen and could not name one thing she had done.

They asked her, at the do. Somebody stood up with a microphone that did not work properly and said the sort of thing you say, and then afterward, sitting down with a paper plate, a young teacher who meant it kindly said, "Della, what are you proudest of?"

And Della, who has never in her life pretended to be modest because it never occurred to her to be otherwise, thought about it honestly and said, "I could not tell you, love."

She meant it. She sat there and went looking, and there was nothing there. Not because it had been a small job. Because it had been the same job, for forty-one years, and a thing you do eight thousand times does not come back to you as an event.

Two hundred dinners a day. Thirty-eight weeks a year. She could tell you the ordering system and she could tell you the exact temperature the ovens run hot by. She could not tell you a single day.

And then a man came over.

Fifties. A big man, in a good coat, awkward the way big men get when they have decided to say something.

He said, "You will not know me."

She said she was sorry, but no.

And he said, "Class of 91. I was the one that got the extra one on Fridays."

Della looked at him.

"You never said anything about it," he said. "You just put it on. Every Friday for about two years. And I never had a Saturday or a Sunday, that is why, and I do not know if you knew that, but I have always thought you knew that."

And Della said, quite quietly, "I did not know that."

And he said, "Well. Somebody knew."

Now, I want to sit with you a minute, whoever you are, wherever you have put in your years.

Forty of them in a kitchen. Or twenty-two on a ward, or nineteen driving, or a lifetime of a house that had to be run and never once got a leaving do at all.

And if somebody asked you tonight what you were proudest of, you would go looking and you would come back with nothing, and you would read that as a verdict.

Somebody is confirming it

There is a prayer at the end of Psalm 90 that is the oldest psalm in the book, written by Moses, an old man at the end of a working life who had watched forty years of ordinary days go by in a wilderness.

Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us; and confirm for us the work of our hands; yes, confirm the work of our hands.Psalm 90:17

He asks for the same thing twice in one verse, which he does not do anywhere else in the psalm. Moses, who saw a sea open, ends with an old man's prayer about hands.

Confirm the work of our hands. The word carries the sense of establishing something, making it stand, giving it a permanence it does not have on its own. It is a builder's word.

And notice what it assumes: that the work of a pair of hands does not naturally last. Moses knew that. Everything he had built with his hands in forty years was tents and pots and a nation that kept complaining. So he asks God to be the one who makes it stand.

So hear this over you, with your paper plate in your lap. You have work behind you that God Himself has been confirming for forty-one years, and the fact that you cannot recall it is not evidence that it was not there. That is written down in the prayer of a man who could not recall most of his own either, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the keeping and the establishing, which means the record was never in your memory and was never meant to be.

Now let me name the thing that is actually hurting, because it is not vanity.

You do not want a trophy. You want to know it mattered.

Those are different, and the difference is worth having said out loud, because you have probably accused yourself of the first one when what you feel is the second.

And here is why the same job for forty years produces that ache with such reliability. Repetition is invisible to the person doing it. A day that is like all the other days does not lay down a memory. So the very faithfulness that makes a person good at a long job is the exact thing that leaves them with nothing to show at the end of it.

You are not empty handed. You are unable to see, which is a different condition and has a different cure.

The written word says God is not unjust so as to forget your work and the love which you have shown toward His name, in having ministered to the saints and in still ministering. Not unjust so as to forget. He is keeping the record because forgetting it would be an injustice, and the Spirit of God is the one who carries that assurance into a person on an evening when their own memory is handing them nothing.

Let me guard something before I go on.

I am not going to tell you that every dinner was secretly a sermon, or that you were doing ministry the whole time and did not know it. That kind of talk sounds warm and it quietly says the work was only valuable because it was really something else.

The dinners were dinners. Two hundred a day, and hot, and on time, and that is a good thing in itself. God fed two hundred children a day through a woman with a bad hip, and He did not need it to be a metaphor.

There was a man five hundred years ago who was accused of lowering holy things when he said that a mother washing a child, and a servant sweeping, were doing works more pleasing to God than the pilgrimages people admired. He said all of our work is God's work when we are placed in it, and that the sweeping is not made holy by our intention, it is holy because He put us there to do it.