The Corridor Is His Too

For the cleaner on the third pass of the same corridor before four in the afternoon.

When Jesus wanted to show his disciples what greatness looked like in his kingdom, he did not describe it. He took off his outer garment, tied a towel round himself, filled a basin, and went round the room washing feet, which was the job of the lowest servant in any house that had one.

Peter objected, which is understandable. The whole arrangement was upside down and everybody in the room knew it. The answer he got was that if this was not done, he had no part with Him, which is one of the strongest sentences in the gospels and it was said over a basin of dirty water.

Now look at the corridor in front of you. Third pass since eleven. Wheel marks from a trolley that came through fifteen minutes after the second pass, and the same four feet by the lift where everybody stops.

The lowest work in the building is the work He picked up on purpose. Scripture says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord, for ye serve the Lord Christ, while the Holy Spirit is in a corridor at four in the afternoon.

The Particular Weight of Work That Gets Undone

Be exact about it, because this is not the usual complaint about unnoticed work and it deserves a more accurate answer.

Your difficulty is not that nobody sees. Plenty of people see, all day, and several of them say thank you. Your difficulty is that it does not stay done.

A carpenter finishes a door and the door stays finished. You finish a corridor, and within eleven minutes a trolley comes through. By the time you have reached the far end, the near end needs doing again. The whole of your working life is spent inside that loop.

Your work is undone faster than any other work in the building, and that is different from being unseen. The written Word calls it serving the Lord Christ rather than producing a result, while the Holy Spirit is in the third pass as fully as in the first.

That's worth naming precisely, because the usual encouragement about hidden work does not touch it. You are not hidden. You are Sisyphean, which is a different problem.

What Gets Measured and What Does Not

Here's something worth seeing, because the loop hides it and nobody in that building will ever say it to you.

An infection that does not happen produces no record. There is no file anywhere for a man who did not get ill in week three of his stay. The entire output of your working life is a set of events that did not occur, and events that did not occur cannot be counted, praised, or put in anybody's annual report.

That means the value of what you do is real and permanently unmeasurable, which is a hard combination for a person to live with and is the actual shape of your job.

What you prevent leaves no record anywhere, and it is still the reason this building works. Scripture calls the work service to Christ rather than a measurable output, while the Holy Spirit sees what never gets written down.

You are serving the Lord Christ on this pass, and you have been serving Him on every pass before it. The written Word says it in the present tense about ordinary labor with no promotion attached, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a third pass down a corridor what the verse says it is.

The Other Thing You Carry Down That Corridor

There's a second job going on in those passes, and nobody has written it into anything either.

You know which room has had no visitors this week. You know the man by the window who says the same thing every day and the woman in the side room whose daughter comes on Tuesdays and looks exhausted in the lift afterward. You know these facts because a person with a mop is in a corridor long enough to see them, and because you look.

You also say something ordinary to about forty people a day. Not a speech. The weather, the lift being slow, the football. For several of those people it is the only unhurried sentence anybody says to them between breakfast and the evening, because everybody else in that building is moving through with a task.

That part of your work has no code, no record, and no category. It happens on the same three passes as the floor, by the same person, in the same hours, and it is as much the job as the mop is.

A person in a corridor sees what people passing through it cannot. The written Word calls ordinary labor service to Christ, while the Holy Spirit works through an unhurried sentence beside a lift.

What This Does Not Promise You

There's a version of this teaching that goes badly wrong, and it is worth refusing before somebody offers it to you.

That version says that if you do it faithfully, God will lift you out of it. Something better is coming. A different role, a word from somebody senior, a season where the corridor is behind you.

Not a word of that is in the verse. Your third pass is not a lever, it puts God under no obligation, and nothing is accruing anywhere on the strength of it.

What it gives instead is a tense. Ye serve the Lord Christ. Not you will. Not one day this will count. The serving is happening now, on this pass, before anything changes and whether or not anything ever does.

A present tense is a harder thing to argue with than a promise, because there is nothing in it to wait for. A promise can be doubted on the grounds that it has not arrived. A description of what is currently happening either fits or it does not.

Hold it against the last forty minutes. Somebody walked the corridor, the floor needed doing again, and it was done. The verse says what that was. It does not say what it will become.

The serving is present tense, and nothing is being banked for later. The written Word says ye serve the Lord Christ rather than promising a way out, while the Holy Spirit is in the work rather than in a reward attached to it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Caleb This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.