The Same Unnoticed Thing For Twenty Years

There is a strange thing that happens to reliable people, and it is almost the opposite of what they were promised.

Picture the woman. She has opened the same building at ten to seven in the morning for twenty one years. She has the keys. She has always had the keys.

In the first year, people said thank you. In the third year, one manager mentioned it in a meeting, and she was embarrassed and pleased.

Nobody has said anything about it since about 2009.

Not because they are ungrateful. Something else has happened, and it is worth naming exactly, because it is not the same as being underappreciated.

She has become part of the building.

The lights are on when people arrive, the way the floor is under their feet when they arrive. Nobody thanks the floor. The floor is a condition of the room rather than a person in it, and after enough years of complete reliability, a person can quietly become a condition of the room.

And here is the strangest part of it. The more faithful she is, the more invisible she becomes. If she were unreliable, if the lights were off one morning in five, she would be extremely visible. Her steadiness is the exact thing that removed her from view.

That is a difficult arithmetic to sit with at fifty nine. It means that the quality she has given twenty one years to is the quality that guarantees nobody mentions it.

And there is no complaint available to her, because what would it be. Nobody has done anything wrong. She would be complaining that things have gone well for two decades.

The woman Luke bothered to describe

There is a person in the Christmas story who gets three verses and is almost always skipped, and the detail Luke includes about her is remarkable.

And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. (Luke 2:37, King James Version)

Which departed not from the temple.

Read what that means as a fact about a life. Decades of the same building, the same hours, the same service, night and day. Anna was not doing something dramatic. She was doing the same thing for longer than most people manage anything.

Now ask why that is in the Gospel at all. Luke is writing an account of the birth of Christ. He has limited space. And he stops to record the age and the length of service of an old woman who had simply not left.

You are the kind of person a Gospel writer stopped to record, and Luke 2 specifies the years and says she departed not from the temple (Luke 2:37), and the Holy Spirit is the one who made sure that detail survived when so much else did not.

And then look at what happens the moment the child arrives.

And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem. (Luke 2:38)

In that instant. She was there when it happened, and she was there because she had been there for decades. The long unremarkable faithfulness put her in the room on the one morning that mattered.

You are in the room because you have been in the room, and Luke 2:38 has her present in that instant after a lifetime of simply not leaving (Luke 2:38), and the Spirit of God is the one who arranges what a long ordinary faithfulness turns out to be for.

The word for what happens at year twenty

There is a sentence in Galatians written to people who had been doing something good for long enough to be tired of it.

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

Weary in well doing. That is a specific and unusual phrase. It is not about being weary of hardship. It is about being tired inside a good thing that has gone on a long time.

That condition needed a name, and Paul gave it one, which means it was common enough in the first century to be worth writing to.

You have a condition that Scripture named rather than a private failing, and Galatians 6 calls it being weary in well doing and warns against it directly (Galatians 6:9), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the actual answer to a tiredness that a rest day does not touch.

And notice what the verse does not do. It does not tell anybody the reaping is next month. It says in due season, which is honest and unspecific, and it puts the whole thing on a timescale nobody is given.

You have not been promised a date, and Galatians 6:9 says in due season rather than naming one (Galatians 6:9), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps that from being a disappointment and lets it be a rest.

What this is not

Let me be plain here, because a woman of fifty nine has heard enough encouragement to be suspicious of it.

This is not promising that somebody says thank you next year. They may not. Twenty one years of silence is a fairly strong indicator, and this article will not pretend to know otherwise.

It is also not saying she should not mind. Minding is not a fault. A person who has given twenty one years of early mornings is allowed to notice that nobody mentions it.

And it is not suggesting she should become less reliable to be seen. That is not on the table and it never will be.

And plainly: if the invisibility has begun to reach past work, if you have started to feel that you do not matter to anyone anywhere, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a job. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. Asking at fifty nine is not a defeat.

You are not being told your ache is unspiritual, and Galatians 6 speaks to weariness in good work rather than correcting anybody for having it (Galatians 6:9), and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hold the ache and the steadiness in the same person without either one canceling the other.