Two Years of Saturdays

The tide went out at six and the group got here at seven, so there is a wide shining flat of wet sand and everything the water left on it.

Mesh bags, one each. A bucket for glass. Two of the long grabber tools that everybody fights over and nobody admits to fighting over. A clipboard on the tailgate with a tally sheet on it, because the county wants counts: bottle caps, monofilament, foam, cans. Somebody's thermos going around. Gulls standing in a line facing the wind, all of them turned the same direction, like a congregation.

He has been doing this every Saturday for two years. The church adopted this stretch of shoreline back when the youth pastor was somebody else, and most weeks it is six or seven people and in October it is forty. He is one of the ones who is always here. He knows where the plastic collects at the north end. He brings the bucket. He takes the full bags off people and walks them back to the truck so they can keep working.

A kid on his first Saturday is filling a bag next to him, a college kid with the sleeves of his sweater pushed up, and he says, without looking up, how long have you been coming out here?

Two years, he says.

Man, the kid says. That has got to do something to you.

And he says yeah. And he moves twenty feet down the beach with his bag and keeps working, and inside him a small cold thing turns over, because that is exactly the question and he does not have an answer for it.

Two years of Saturdays. Two years of showing up before the light is good, of hauling bags, of putting the chairs away. If somebody handed him a card right now and asked him to write down one thing inside him that has moved, one thing, he would sit there with the pen and not be able to do it. The same short fuse in the parking lot on a bad day. The same quiet at his own table. The same man, apparently, doing more.

You know the tally sheet. Yours might be a sign-up sheet on a foyer wall, or a Wednesday night nobody has seen you miss in six years, or the coffee that is always made because you make it. And you know the small cold turn when somebody says it must be doing something to you, and the honest answer that has never left your mouth, which is that you cannot find it.

The report belongs to the One doing the work

Come walk the tideline with me while they finish the north end. I want to read you one sentence, and I want you to notice who is doing what in it.

Paul is in prison writing to a church he loves at Philippi, and he opens by telling them what he is sure of.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Count the actors in that sentence. He began it. He brings it to completion. The people at Philippi are the field, not the farmer. Paul does not ask them to send back a list of what has changed so he can check whether his confidence is warranted. His confidence is not in their progress report. It is in the One who started.

You are inside a work that Somebody else began and Somebody else finishes, and the confidence in that sentence was never yours to produce. That is Philippians 1:6 as it stands, and the Spirit is the one who takes a line written to a church in Macedonia and lays it over a man on a beach with a mesh bag, so it stops being a nice verse and starts being a description of him.

And look at the deadline, because that is the mercy people skim past. The day of Jesus Christ. Not your second anniversary of Saturdays. The completion date is His and it is far off, and everything between here and there is the work in progress, which is the only honest name for any of us.

You have a good work in you that was begun on purpose and is being carried the same way it was started. His word says so plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping it moving in the weeks nobody could photograph, which is most of them.

You cannot watch a tree grow

I keep ground for a living, so let me tell you the thing every person who keeps ground learns and nobody believes until they have kept ground a while.

Nobody has ever seen a tree grow. Not once. Stand there all afternoon and there is nothing to see. What can be seen is shade. Stand in the same spot at noon three summers apart and the shade has moved four feet across the yard, and that is the whole of the evidence, and it accumulated on a thousand days when nobody was watching.

Jesus said it before I did, and He said it about exactly this.

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how.Mark 4:26-27

He knows not how. That is not a failure in the man. That is the design. The growth is deliberately not on his calendar and not in his hands, and the parable never scolds him for sleeping through it.

You were never given the job of watching it happen, and the not seeing is written into the way the thing grows. That is Mark 4, and the same Spirit who makes a seed split open under six inches of dirt is not obliged to send up a notice when He does it.

So when a man stands on the wet sand and searches himself for a difference and comes up with nothing, look at what he has actually discovered. He has discovered that nobody can see a tree grow. He has discovered nothing whatever about the tree.

You are inside a growing thing, and the growing does not report to your attention. Scripture says the seed comes up while the man sleeps, and it is His Spirit and not your noticing that does the coming up.

Who is holding the tape measure

Now the other half, and this is where I want to take something out of your hand.

An assessment has been running. Every time somebody says it must be doing something to you, an audit opens, and the search goes through you for movement, and the audit closes with nothing found, and that gets filed as a result. Paul knew that instrument and put it down.

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self. For I know nothing by myself; yet am I not hereby justified: but he that judgeth me is the Lord.1 Corinthians 4:3-4

Read what he did there. He will not let the church at Corinth grade him, and then he does the harder thing and will not grade himself either. Not because he had a long list and was being humble. Because the assessment of a man's inside is a job that belongs to Someone with better eyes.

You were never appointed the assessor of your own inside, and handing that back is obedience rather than laziness. It is written that the Lord is the one who judges, and it is the Spirit who searches the deep things, which is a sentence about His capacity and not about yours.

And hear this, because I am not going to do to you what that card did. I will not tell you your list is longer than you think and hand you three items for it. A long list is not a better answer than a short one, and a short one is not a warning sign. The length of a list only ever measured how good a person is at watching themselves, which was never the thing under discussion.

You have permission from the word itself to stop scoring this. The word takes the measuring out of your hands and puts it in His, and the Spirit who applies that sentence is not waiting for you to argue with it first.