When Did We See You

She is holding out for something meaningful and she does not know that is what she is doing.

Ask her and she will tell you she wants to serve. She means it. She has meant it for nine years.

But watch what happens when an actual opportunity comes past.

Somebody needs a lift. That is just a lift. Somebody needs the same soup they had last week. That is just soup. The woman across the way wants somebody to sit with her for an hour and talk about absolutely nothing at all. That is just company.

Every one of those gets measured against a picture in her head of what real service looks like, and every one of them comes up short, so she declines gently and waits.

And what she is waiting for is a need with weight on it. Something that will feel, while she is doing it, like the thing she has been called to.

She is thirty-seven. In nine years she has done almost nothing, and she has been sincere the entire time.

That is the part I want you to hear, because it is not laziness. It is a size problem.

So let me ask you.

What are you holding out for that a sandwich would not qualify as?

They did not remember doing it

There is a scene in Matthew everybody knows the shape of, and I am not going to preach the frightening half of it at you, because you are not somebody who needs to be threatened into caring. You have been trying to care for nine years.

I want the part in the middle, where the people He commends answer Him.

Then the righteous will answer him, Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?Matthew 25:37

They do not remember doing it.

That is the astonishing thing in that exchange. He lists what they did, and their honest reaction is confusion, because what they actually did was hand somebody a plate, and it did not feel like anything at the time.

Matthew 25 has the commended ones unable to recall the acts being described to them, and the Spirit put that bewilderment in the record rather than a speech of achievement, so the significance you are holding out to feel has never once been part of how this gets done.

Now come here, because I want to be very tender with this and then very direct.

Tender first. Your longing to give something that matters is a beautiful thing. It is not vanity and I refuse to call it that. It comes from loving Him.

Now direct. It is a filter, and it has been filtering out every single opportunity for nine years, and a filter that rejects everything is not discernment.

Matthew 25 has Him naming food, water and a visit as the whole of it, and the Spirit put ordinary items in that list rather than significant ones, which means every lift and every bowl of soup you have measured and declined was the thing itself arriving in its actual size.

And listen to what their question reveals about how they lived.

If you do not remember feeding somebody, it is because you fed a lot of people, casually, without ranking any of it.

That is the life underneath that answer. Not one magnificent act. A great many small ones, none of which got recorded, even by them.

Matthew 25 shows people who kept no account of their own serving, and the Spirit was in every unremembered plate of it, so an act that feels like nothing while you are doing it has never once been an act that missed.