Twelve Years And No Evidence

Deb is third car back, level with the fire hydrant, which is the spot she has been taking since Danny was in fifth grade because you can pull out without waiting for the whole line.

It is the last one. Not the last one this week. The last one. Danny is a senior and there are four days of school left and he is driving himself the last three, so this afternoon is the end of a thing that started when he was six years old with a backpack that came down to the back of his knees.

She did the arithmetic in the shower that morning, which was a mistake. Roughly one hundred and eighty school days a year. Twelve years, and there were three years in the middle where she had two of them at two different buildings and did the run twice. Somewhere north of two thousand five hundred trips down Elm. She stopped when the number got that big because it stopped meaning anything.

The lunch box is in the passenger footwell. It is the third one they have owned. She washed it that morning at half past six the way she washes it every morning, wiped the seal out with the corner of a dish towel, and only afterward remembered that it did not matter anymore, and stood there at the sink with the towel in her hand.

And here is the thing she cannot get past, sitting in this car at half past two with the sun coming down the street and the dust showing on the windshield.

There is no evidence.

Not of the bad kind. Danny is fine. He is a decent, unremarkable, funny kid who leaves cups in his room and who will probably be all right. But nothing about him points at any of it. He has never once mentioned a lunch. Not one. Not the ones where she cut the sandwiches diagonally because he went through a year of only eating them diagonal. Not the note she used to put in when he was eight, which she stopped doing the day she saw one still folded up at the bottom of the box at four in the afternoon.

And there is Mateo, whom she has driven every Wednesday for six years because his mom works Wednesdays out by the airport. Six years of Wednesdays. That is something like two hundred and forty afternoons of a boy in her back seat with his knees up, and what she has from all of it is "thanks Miss Deb," which he says every single time, in exactly the same voice, and has never varied by one word.

She is not bitter. She wants to be clear with herself about that, sitting there. Nobody owes her anything. She is not sitting in a pickup line waiting for a speech.

It is just that at the end of two thousand five hundred trips down the same street, a person expects to be able to hold something up. And she has an empty lunch box on the floor of the passenger side, washed at half past six for no reason, and that is the whole of what there is.

The doors open at the top of the steps. Kids come out in twos and threes.

Nobody harvests in April

There is a sentence people put on cards, and the card version has almost nothing to do with what is actually going on in it.

And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.Galatians 6:9

Start with who it is spoken to. You do not tell somebody not to be weary unless they are weary. That line was written to people already worn out, and the writer knows it, and there is not one syllable of correction in it anywhere.

Then look at the middle of it, which is where everything is. Due season. Not soon. Not by the end of the school year. Due, which means owed to the crop by the calendar of the ground, and set by somebody who is not the farmer. A sower does not get to name the season. That has never been part of the arrangement and no farmer alive resents it, because a man who dug up his own field in April to check would only have killed the wheat.

You are a person who has been sowing for twelve years, and the seed is not lying on the surface where you left it. Galatians 6:9 names the due season and the naming was never yours to do, and the Holy Spirit is what walks a sentence like that out of a letter and into a car parked by a fire hydrant.

And about that last clause, if we faint not, because that clause has been used badly for a long time. It is not a qualification exam. Paul is not adding a condition you could fail and thereby lose your harvest. He is saying the thing every grower says to every other grower in the middle of a long season, which is: do not dig it up. The verse is company, not a threshold.

You have a harvest in the ground already, and it is not waiting on your stamina to come back. Mark 4:27 says the seed springs and grows up while the man sleeps and he knows not how, and what the Spirit adds is that the not knowing was in the design from the start, not a fault in the sower.

You were never issued the receipt

Here is what I think actually hurts about the empty lunch box, and it is not ingratitude and it is not the absence of a thank you.

It is the suspicion that if a thing left no trace, the thing may not have happened.

We are trained into that. Everything else in an adult life comes with a record. Work has a paycheck and a review. School had a grade. Even a run has a number on your wrist at the end of it. Twelve years of getting up at half past six is the single largest project most people ever undertake and it is the one thing in the whole catalog that issues no statement of any kind, and a person sitting in a car at the end of it can be forgiven for wondering whether the whole thing went into the air.

It did not go into the air. It went into people.

You were never issued the receipt, and the absence of one is not the absence of the thing. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, which is written down and has been in the record for two thousand years, and the Spirit reads that over a woman in a driver's seat in the present tense.

Now I am going to be careful here, because this is exactly the place where messages like this one usually cheat.

I am not going to tell you that one day the thank you comes. I do not know that and neither does anybody else, and a promise like that made to a person in a pickup line is a small cruelty dressed up as encouragement. Some sowers are told. Most are not. Deb may go the rest of her life without a single sentence from Mateo about six years of Wednesdays, and the odds are honestly that she will.

What I can tell you is the other thing, which is the thing this whole message exists for.

It is already done, and it landed on people whose names you may never hear said back to you. Isaiah 55:11 puts that past appeal, that His word does not return empty, and the Spirit is not waiting on evidence to arrive before He agrees with what is already written.