Hid With Christ

He has done the same job for fourteen years and he is extremely good at it and the people who benefit from it do not know his name.

That is not self-pity, it is the actual arrangement. He is the second layer. He checks the thing that the person who presents the thing presents, and when he catches something, which he does often, the person who presents it says thank you in an email, and then that person presents it and gets the room.

At church it is the same shape. He sets up. He has set up for eleven years, and he is there at seven when it is dark and cold, and by the time anybody arrives it looks like the room was simply always like that, which is the entire point of doing it well.

And a thing has happened slowly that he has never said out loud. It started as an observation about his life and it has become a suspicion about God.

If nobody in fourteen years has looked directly at him, and if nobody in eleven has, then perhaps that is simply what he is. Perhaps the invisibility is not a circumstance. Perhaps it is a fact about how he is regarded, all the way up.

If that suspicion has started in you, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to tell you that you are being oversensitive.

Paul uses the word hidden about the most valuable thing there is

Here is a sentence that turns the whole vocabulary round, and it does it in five words.

For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.Colossians 3:3

Your life is hid. Paul chooses the word deliberately, and he chooses it as good news, in a letter written to encourage people.

Because there are two completely different things that the English word hidden can mean, and they feel identical from the inside of a life like his.

One is: overlooked. Not valued enough to be seen. Left out because nobody thought to include you.

The other is: kept. Put somewhere safe on purpose. Hidden the way a thing of value is hidden, by somebody who intends to keep it.

Paul means the second, and you can tell from the rest of the sentence: hid with Christ in God. That is not a description of neglect. That is a description of a location, and the location is inside the Son, inside the Father, which is the most guarded place in the universe.

You are being kept rather than overlooked, and it was already the second word all along. Colossians 3:3 is where that sits, in a sentence that puts the hiding inside God rather than outside anybody's notice, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it as encouragement is the one who separates two words in a man who has had them fused for fourteen years.

The work at seven in the morning is the same class of thing

Now let me say the other half, because a good sentence about God is not going to fix eleven years of chairs by itself.

There is a kind of work whose success is measured by its own invisibility. If he does the setting up well, nobody notices the room. If he catches the error, the error never happens and therefore never existed and therefore cannot be pointed at.

That is not a defect in his job. That is the nature of the job, and it is the nature of a great deal of the most important work anybody does anywhere, and almost every genuinely necessary thing in a building is behind a wall.

But here is the cost nobody accounts for. A man who does that work for fourteen years accumulates no evidence. He has nothing to look at. And in the absence of evidence a person will construct an explanation, and the explanation he constructed is the one about being the sort of thing that is not looked at.

That is not weakness. That is what a mind does with fourteen years of no data.

You have a Father whose attention has never once been governed by visibility, and it was on you at seven in the morning in the cold. He promised it, in the words about a Father who sees in secret, where the seeing in secret is the whole point of the sentence (Matthew 6:6), and His Spirit is not distributed by who gets the room.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before anything else, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And a specific word for a man who feels unseen: nothing quiet on this site is a way of becoming more hidden. The privacy here is about audience and never about concealment, and telling your doctor is right, telling your wife is right, and telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have never been asked to disappear further, and you never were. It is written into Matthew 6:6, where the whole weight is on a Father who sees rather than on anything being kept from anyone, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who has had enough of not being noticed.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.