Sunday Was the Serving

Marva teaches year five and she gave up the Sunday group in the February and cried about it in a car.

Not because anybody was unkind. They were lovely about it. That is almost worse, in a way, because there was nobody to be angry at.

She had done that group for six years. Sunday mornings, plus the planning on a Thursday night, plus the WhatsApp, plus the two residential weekends a year. And by the January she was getting to Sunday having already spent everything, and she was short with children on a Sunday in a way she was never short with children on a Wednesday, and she knew what that meant.

So she stepped back. And the woman she told said, "Of course, darling, you have to look after yourself," and hugged her, and meant it entirely.

And Marva sat in her car in that car park and sobbed, because what she had actually just done, in her own understanding of her own life, was stop serving God.

That is what she believed. Not as a doctrine she could have defended. As a fact so deep in her that she had never once had to look at it: Sunday was the serving, and Monday to Friday was the job that paid for the house.

Thirty children. Five days a week. Thirty-eight weeks a year.

Her aunt Dorrell got it out of her in the kitchen about a fortnight later, and let her get all the way to the end of it, and then asked one question.

"How many of them do you pray for by name?"

Marva said, "What?"

"The thirty. In your class. How many do you pray for by name?"

And Marva said, "All of them."

She said it like it was nothing. Like it was an admin detail.

And Dorrell put her cup down very deliberately and said, "Marva. You pray for thirty children by name, five days a week, and you teach them, and you feed two of them, and you know which one is not sleeping. And you have just sat in a car park and told God you have stopped serving Him."

Look at the list Paul actually wrote

Paul makes a list of gifts in Romans 12, and it is worth reading it flat, without the categories somebody has since laid over the top of it.

Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, each of us is to use them properly: if prophecy, according to the proportion of his faith; if service, in his serving; or he who teaches, in his teaching.Romans 12:6 to 7

Prophecy. Service. Teaching. And it goes on: exhorting, giving, leading, showing mercy.

Now notice what Paul does not do anywhere in that list. He does not say which of them happen in a religious building and which happen elsewhere. He does not divide it into ministry and employment. He names functions, and he tells each person to get on with theirs.

He who teaches, in his teaching. That is it. That is the whole instruction. Not: he who teaches, on Sundays.

So hear this over you, in the car park. You are serving in your teaching and you have been serving in it five days a week for six years, and the thing you gave up in February was one expression of it and not the whole of it. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one distributing these gifts to each one individually just as He wills, and He did not distribute yours with a timetable attached.

Now let me be careful, because this could be misused in two directions.

It is not an argument against the Sunday group. That work is real and somebody has to do it, and the people who do it are giving something costly, and I would not say a word against them.

And it is not permission to call anything you happen to be doing ministry. A person who is coasting at work and telling themselves it is service is fooling nobody, and I think you know that, and I do not think that is you.

The point is narrower and it is sharper: the gift does not change when the building does.

What you have is teaching. It is the same gift on a Wednesday morning in front of thirty ten year olds as it is on a Sunday morning in front of eleven. The content differs. The gift is the same gift, given by the same Spirit, exercised by the same woman.

And here is what has been costing you. You have been running one gift twice, in two buildings, and only counting one of them, and then blaming yourself for being tired.

That is not devotion. That is bad arithmetic, and it has been taking a toll on you for six years.

You are not less useful to God this February than you were last February. Scripture says whatever you do, do it from the soul as for the Lord, and it draws no line between the two rooms, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that real to a woman in a car park rather than leaving it a nice idea somebody said once.

There was a man five hundred years ago who was accused of destroying the distinction between sacred and secular work, and who cheerfully agreed that he was. He said the whole idea of a holy occupation and an ordinary one was an invention, and that a schoolteacher's work was, in his own words, next to preaching the most useful thing in the world, and that he could hardly say which of the two he thought was greater.