Thirty Years And A Bench

Harlan Cobb's son built him a bench out of two by eights and set it at the bottom of the gravel drive on Mill Road, next to the mailbox, because Harlan is eighty one and the walk down is easier than the walk back up and he needed somewhere to sit before he tried it.

He sits there most afternoons from about four until the shadows come across the road. There is not much traffic on Mill Road. A propane truck. The Vanover girl going to her shift. Somebody's grandson on a four wheeler he should not be on.

Harlan taught the boys' class at Zion Ridge Church from 1968 to 1998. Thirty years, eight to twelve year olds, in the room behind the kitchen with the folding chairs and the flannel board and later a chalkboard his wife Ada painted the frame on. He was never on the board. He never preached. He got there at eight fifteen every Sunday and he had a lesson ready and he was not particularly good at it, in his own estimation, and he did it for thirty years.

What he does on the bench, and he would deny this if you asked him, is count.

He counts the ones he can account for. Denny Rausch went into the service and Harlan heard he did all right. There was a boy named Cleve who is in Fort Madison and has been for a long time. Two of them are dead, one at nineteen on Route 6 and one much later of the same thing that took his father. Most of them he simply lost. They moved off after high school the way everybody does, to Indianapolis and Columbus and wherever the work was, and he never heard another word.

Nobody ever came back.

That is the part that sits on him. In thirty years of Sundays and twenty eight more years of sitting on this bench, not one man has ever pulled into that drive and said Mr. Cobb, that room did something for me. Not one letter. Not one word at a funeral. He does not resent it. He is not a man who thinks anybody owed him anything. But he is eighty one, and he has had time to add it up, and the total he keeps arriving at is zero.

Ada died in 2014. She would have told him he was being ridiculous. She would have said it in about four words and gone back to her beans.

So he sits with his cane against the bench and watches the light go long across the Whitakers' field, and the thought is right there where it always is, and it is not dramatic and it does not make him cry. It is just a plain old sentence he has gotten used to.

Thirty years, and I cannot name one thing that came of it.

The mail carrier goes by at four twenty and waves. Harlan waves back.

Cast, and it goes where you cannot follow

There is a verse people put on cards without ever looking at what the picture actually is.

Cast thy bread upon the waters: for thou shalt find it after many days.Ecclesiastes 11:1

Look at the verb. Cast. Not plant, where you can come back and check the row. Not hand to somebody, where you get to watch their face. Cast, out onto moving water, where the current takes it and you stand on the bank and it is gone.

Most people who know that country think the picture is a merchant loading grain onto ships and sending it out. Months at sea. No word. No way to check. You stand at the dock and the sail gets small and then there is only water.

The whole design of the picture is that you do not get to watch.

You are the one who cast it, and the casting was the whole of your part in it. I am not saying that to make an old man feel better on a bench. Ecclesiastes 11:1 puts the casting in the man's hands and puts everything after it out of them, and the written word does not hand him a manifest to check the cargo against. And the Holy Spirit is not withholding a report from you. There was never a report in the arrangement.

Now read the second half honestly, because I am not going to overpromise it and neither does the text. It says the bread is not lost. It does not say a letter comes. It does not say anybody drives up your gravel and tells you. Those are two entirely different sentences and the one on the card is the first one.

You have already let it go, and Ecclesiastes calls that casting and never once calls it losing. That is written in Ecclesiastes 11:1, in a book that is famously unwilling to flatter anybody about anything. What the Spirit adds, on a bench at four twenty in the afternoon, is that the bread you cannot see is not the bread that went nowhere.

The ledger was never yours to keep

Here is a thing about a lamp that took me a long time to notice.

A lamp is the one object in a room that never gets to see the room lit. It is in its own glare. Every face at that table, every hand, the pattern on the wallpaper, the boy doing his homework in the corner, all of that is visible to everyone in the room except the thing that is lighting it.

That is not a defect in the lamp. That is what it is to be the source of light in a place. You do not get the view.

You were never given the ledger, and the not knowing is not a hole in your work or a mark against your faith. Ecclesiastes 11:1 hands the man a verb and nothing else, and the written word is content to leave it there. The Spirit does not treat your empty column as evidence of anything. He has never asked you for a number.

And I want to say plainly what I am not doing here. I am not telling you that if you had eyes to see it you would find the results. I am not telling you there is a list somewhere you have earned the right to read. I do not know what came of that room and neither do you, and anybody who claims otherwise is making it up.

What I know is what is written, and what is written is that bread cast on water is not thrown away.

This is yours: thirty years of eight fifteen on a Sunday morning, and a light you were the one person in that room who could not see. Matthew 5:16 says people see and glorify the Father, which means the seeing was assigned to them and the glory was assigned to Him and neither one of those jobs was ever yours. And the Spirit was in the room behind the kitchen every one of those mornings, whether or not one single soul ever mentioned it afterward.