He Does Not Work Down a List

The hatch of the catering van bangs up at half past ten and the extractor fan starts with it, and the smell is across the yard before anybody has finished walking over.

Thirty of them out of the unit at once. Work boots, high visibility over fleeces, somebody's radio still playing in a cab with the door open. There is one tray left under the heat lamp and everyone can see exactly how much is on it. The lad in front takes two. The woman after him takes one and asks for brown sauce. Then it is his turn, and there is one left, and the man behind him is already looking past his shoulder at it.

His hand does the thing his hand has always done. A half turn, a tip of the head towards the tray, go on, you have it, and the man says cheers and takes it, and the whole exchange lasts under two seconds, and nowhere inside it was there a moment where he decided anything.

He goes off with a bread roll and a cup of tea, and behind him the woman at the hatch says, to nobody in particular, that there is plenty more coming out in five minutes.

He does not hear her. He is already halfway back across the yard.

That is you, and you would not have noticed you did it.

It is not that you did not want it. It is that you ran the sum before your hand moved, the way you always run it: somebody else's need looked bigger than yours, so yours went where you keep it, which is behind everybody. You have been doing that since before anybody can remember teaching it to you. And then, without ever once sitting down and deciding to, you ran the same sum about God. He is real. He is good. He is presumably extremely busy. There are children in hospital tonight. There are people whose lives are genuinely coming apart. You would never say He does not care about you. You simply worked out where you come in the order, and you have been careful ever since not to take up anything that somebody worse off might need.

The sum you ran before your hand ever moved

Nobody sat you down and taught you this. It came out of rooms where the arithmetic was perfectly true, because a tray with one roll left on it is a genuine shortage, and in a room like that your hand was right and your deference was love. There are places in this world where somebody does have to go without, and you have spent your life quietly making sure it was you. Heaven has watched every one of those small handings over and not one of them went unnoticed. Scripture stands under that in Luke 12:6, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

But you carried that arithmetic somewhere it does not apply, and it has cost you more than you know.

Here is what it costs, and I am going to say it plainly, because from the outside it looks like a virtue. You pray for other people. You are good at it. There is a list, whether it is written down or not, and every name on it belongs to somebody else. When something in your own chest goes tight and will not loosen, you do not bring it to Him. You file it. Not because you doubt Him, but because you would not want to take up the space, and you settled it long ago that you are the least urgent person in any room you walk into. You have been so careful, for so many years, that nobody has ever noticed you left yourself off. It is written, in Luke 12:6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Now look at what Jesus does with the cheapest thing on a market stall.

Are not five sparrows sold for two farthings, and not one of them is forgotten before God? But even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not therefore: ye are of more value than many sparrows.Luke 12:6-7

There is a detail hidden in that price and it is worth stopping for. Elsewhere the going rate is two sparrows for a farthing. Here it is five for two farthings, and if you do that small piece of arithmetic, the fifth bird goes in free. Thrown in. Not worth pricing on its own.

The stall did exactly what you do. It looked at a great many small identical things and decided the extra one was not worth putting a price on. And Jesus reaches past the four that were paid for, picks up the one that was not, and says that not one of them is forgotten before God.

Then He turns from the stall to your head, and says the hairs of it are all numbered. Nobody has ever numbered hair for administrative reasons. That is the attention of someone who cannot stop looking.

And watch what He does with a man who had taken himself out of the way on purpose.

There is a crowd in Jericho and a short man in it who cannot see over anybody, so he runs ahead and climbs a tree, which is not the behavior of a man expecting to be included. He is not calling out. He is not asking for anything. He is not a popular man in that town and he knows it, and the tree is far enough back that he can watch the whole thing happen to other people, which is the arrangement he has made with his life.

Jesus stops under the tree. He looks up, He says the man's name, and He says that today He must stay at his house.

Not at some point. Not once the more pressing cases are seen to. Today, and at your house, to a man who had climbed out of the way so as not to be a nuisance to anybody. The people around Him grumbled about the choice, because a crowd always has an opinion about who is worth stopping for, and He went to the house anyway.

He has not changed since. He has not become busier, He has not developed a shortage of attention, and He has never once worked down a list in order of severity.