The First Tortilla Before Sunrise

For the cook who has made the same thing four thousand times and has never once called it holy.

It's the cloth that gets you. A clean one, folded twice, laid into the basket so the first few keep their heat until the rest arrive, and you change it at about seven because by then it has gone damp.

The first one is always slightly wrong. Everybody who does this knows it. The comal hasn't settled, the heat is uneven at one edge, and the first is the one you eat yourself standing up at twenty to six.

Then the rest. Four thousand of them, roughly, across three years in this kitchen, into a cloth-lined basket that goes out at half six for people who mostly do not look up from their phones.

The work under your hands is not in a separate compartment from God, and it never has been. 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 hotel kitchen at twenty to six.

How the Line Got Drawn

Be exact about it, because the divide is real in your head and has never been examined properly.

Nobody taught it to you directly. What you absorbed, over a long time, is a picture in which whatever carries God's name counts, and everything else is what a man does so he can get to those hours.

Under that arrangement your week has about five hours in it that matter and fifty that are neutral. That arithmetic runs quietly every morning, and it is why the kitchen feels like the part of your life you pass through rather than the part you live in.

You have divided your week into the part that counts and the part that pays for it. The written Word puts whatever you do under one heading rather than sorting it, while the Holy Spirit does not wait outside a kitchen door until the shift ends.

It shows in small ways. You would never describe the job to somebody at church without a slight shrug in the sentence. You would not pray about a comal. You have done both of those for years without noticing.

What Four Thousand Actually Means

Here's something worth stopping on, because the number is the thing you have been using as evidence against yourself.

Four thousand is not proof that the work is meaningless. It is proof that four thousand mornings began well for somebody, most of whom will never know your name and several of whom were having the worst week of their year.

A man on his own, away from home, in a hotel at half six, is in one of the lonelier situations available to an adult. What he meets first is a basket with a cloth in it and something warm underneath. That is not nothing, and you are the reason it is there.

The repetition is the point rather than the problem. Scripture calls ordinary labor service to the Lord Christ, while the Holy Spirit is in a warm basket at half six as truly as anywhere else.

There's a detail in this you have never counted as anything, which is the cloth. Nobody in that dining room has ever thought about it. Nobody would notice if it went. You change it at seven because a damp cloth makes the last ones heavy, and that decision, made every morning for three years, is the difference between a basket and a good basket.

Nobody asked you to care about the cloth. You do it because that's what you are like, which is the same reason the first one gets eaten standing up rather than served.

What Is Not Being Offered Here

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

That version says that if you work faithfully as to the Lord, He will notice and your situation will improve. A better kitchen. A head chef's job. Money, or a word from somebody, or your own place one day.

The verse contains none of it. Four thousand tortillas put God under no obligation. Nothing is accruing, there is no balance anywhere, and the work is not a lever.

What it hands over instead is a tense. Ye serve the Lord Christ. Not one day this will count. It counts at twenty to six, in the doing of it, whether or not anything about your situation ever changes.

That tense is doing more than it looks. It removes the waiting entirely, and the waiting is where most of the tiredness has been living.

Four thousand mornings of thinking this will count for something one day is four thousand mornings spent slightly elsewhere. The verse puts the whole of it back into the morning it is actually happening in, which is the only morning any of it was ever in.

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 up, while the Holy Spirit is in the shift rather than in a reward attached to it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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