Daily Manna · Day 138 · May 18
Work Remembered
“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.”
Who thanked the woman who set out the chairs?
Somebody sat in a hospital chair for six hours while the family who got the phone calls were still in traffic. A casserole went across a doorstep in a foil pan, still warm, handed over without much said. There is a woman in a care home with exactly one visitor, and it is not her son. None of this is written down anywhere.
Hebrews 6 is addressed to people worn thin enough to walk away, and the writer has just said something severe to them. Then he turns: But, beloved, we are persuaded better things of you. And the ground he gives for that confidence is not their stamina. It is God's character. For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love. Not sentimental, just. It would be an injustice for him to mislay it, and he does not commit injustices. Then watch the tense at the end of the verse. Ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. Past and present, both. He is not writing an obituary for a finished career. He is watching this week.
Father, you saw the chair and the pan and the drive over. I did not do it to be seen and I have been counting anyway. Take the counting off me. Where it has gone unthanked, let that be enough, because you are just and you have not forgotten it. Keep me at it tomorrow, unrecorded, for the ones who cannot pay it back. Amen.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 138 is Settled on Their Lees (Zephaniah 1:12).