A List Of Names Nobody Knows

Nine years she has been unlocking that building.

Six forty in the morning most Sundays, and the heating, and the urn, and the chairs, and the thing with the fuse box that only she knows how to do because she is the one who was there the night it went.

She does the rota. She does the flowers when the flower person is away, which is often. She sat with a woman in a hospital corridor for eleven hours in February and told nobody, and would be genuinely annoyed if she knew I mentioned it.

And she has started counting.

That is the part she is ashamed of. About three years ago she began, without meaning to, keeping a tally of how many times her name gets said from the front, and the answer over three years is twice, and one of those was a mispronunciation.

She knows exactly how this sounds. She has told herself all the correct things: that she does not do it for that, that God sees, that the reward is elsewhere and later, and every one of those is true and none of them has stopped the counting.

Last month a young man was thanked warmly and at length for setting up a projector.

She was glad for him. She was. And she went into the kitchen and stood by the sink for a minute before she came back out, and she has thought about that minute more than she wants to.

Twenty-six names, and somebody wrote them down

Let me start where the correct answers stop working, because you have been given all of them and you are still counting.

God sees. That is true. It is also the sentence people say to close a conversation, and you have noticed that it is usually said by somebody who does get thanked.

So I am not going to hand it to you as a lid. I am going to show you something else, and it is a piece of the record that most readers skip.

Hear this and take it as already settled rather than as consolation: being unnamed from the front is not the same as being unnamed, and there is a whole chapter that exists to prove it. That is not my sympathy talking, it is what stands written in the sixteenth chapter of Romans, and the same Holy Spirit who moved that letter is the one who was with you in a hospital corridor for eleven hours in February.

The last chapter of that letter is a list. Twenty-six people, greeted by name.

I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church in Cenchreae. Greet Priscilla and Aquila, my co-workers in Christ Jesus. They risked their lives for me.Romans 16:1-4

Read what happens there and read who it happens to.

Almost nobody on that list is famous. Most of them appear once in the entire collection and never again. A woman carrying the letter. A couple who worked with their hands. Somebody's mother, who is described as having been a mother to the writer too. A man simply called my dear friend.

They are not there for information. Nobody needed that list to understand the argument of the letter. It is there because a man dictating the most closely argued thing he ever wrote stopped at the end and named the people who had actually held it up.

And so this is yours right now rather than after somebody gets round to it: you are on the list already, because the written word ends its densest letter with twenty-six ordinary names and treats that as worth the ink, and the Spirit of God has been in that building at six forty in the morning for nine years with nobody else awake.

And I will guard this, because bitterness would love to get in here dressed as justice.

Nothing here says your leaders are wicked. Some of them are tired and some of them are thoughtless and most of them genuinely do not know, and the young man with the projector did nothing to you at all.

What is written simply establishes that naming people is a thing the record does, and the Holy Spirit has never once run this on a rota of the visible.