Nobody Signed the Sheet

Tonight we are making a big pot of vegetable and bean soup with a skillet of cornbread, and it is the sort of thing that feeds a crowd or a week.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook a chopped onion, two carrots and two sticks of celery in oil in a big pot with salt for ten minutes until soft. Add three cloves of chopped garlic and a spoon of any dried herb for a minute. Add two cans of beans with their liquid, a can of chopped tomatoes, six cups of water or broth, and a couple of chopped potatoes. Bring it up and let it go gently for thirty minutes until the potatoes are completely soft. Mash a mug of it against the side and stir it back in to thicken the whole pot. Salt again at the end and finish with vinegar and black pepper. For the cornbread, heat a greased skillet in a 425 oven while you mix one cup of cornmeal, half a cup of flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, salt, an egg and a cup of milk, then pour it into the hot pan and bake twenty minutes until set right through. It feeds ten, it costs a few dollars, and it freezes.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the soup.

It is the sheet on the table by the door.

You put your name at the top of it on a Sunday. You offered to bring the food for the Thursday thing, and you meant it, and you were glad to do it.

And the sheet sat there all week with your name and nothing under it. You looked at it on Wednesday evening on your way past and there were still no names, and you went home and cooked anyway, because you had said you would, and because by then the not cooking would have meant something too.

And on Thursday four people came, and it was fine, and now you are carrying most of a pot back out to your car in the dark.

The verse at the end of the resurrection chapter

There is a line at the very end of First Corinthians fifteen that is placed where it is on purpose.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. (1 Corinthians 15:58, King James Version)

The whole chapter before it is about the resurrection. Fifty seven verses of the biggest argument in the New Testament, and then it lands, not on a doctrine, but on a practical instruction about work.

And the reason it gives is worth reading twice. Not: your work will be rewarded. Not: your work will be noticed. He says it is not in vain, which is to say it does not evaporate, it does not fall on the floor, it does not fail to exist.

Which means the pot carried out to that car exists. It was not canceled by an empty sheet.

You are working in a place where nothing falls on the floor, and God has never once let an offering evaporate because nobody signed for it. First Corinthians 15:58 puts the whole weight of a resurrection argument behind the claim that work is not wasted, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it in a parking lot at nine at night.

You have not been overlooked in this, and heaven has never once counted a service by attendance. It is written that your labor is not in vain in the Lord, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the pot is going on.

What the empty sheet is not saying

Now let me name what happened in your head between Wednesday and Thursday, because I think it went somewhere it should not have.

An empty column got looked at, and somewhere in the looking, the column became a statement about a person. Not: people are busy in October. Not: nobody looks at that table by the door. It became a small measurement of whether people wanted to come to a thing one particular woman was feeding.

And that is not what a sign up sheet measures. It measures whether a person walked past a table with a pen in their hand on a Sunday when their children were pulling at them. That is all it has ever measured.

An empty sheet is not a verdict on the woman whose name is at the top of it.

You are not unwanted, and God has never once let a blank column speak about a person. The passage attaches the value of work to the Lord it is done in rather than to the response it gets, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a measurement away from a piece of paper that was never qualified to make one.

You have been serving that place for years and nobody has counted that either, which is the same fact from the other side. First Corinthians 15 is written to people who needed to know their effort was not disappearing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so at the exact hour a person doubts it.

Send it out rather than freezing it

Here is the practical part, and it is about where the soup goes.

There is a lot of it. The default is the freezer, and the freezer is fine, but the freezer also means the whole week stays sitting in a container with the empty sheet attached to it.

So do something else. Take a container to two people this week, without being asked and without an occasion. Somebody who has been ill. Somebody who lives alone. Somebody who is having a hard month and has not told anybody.

Do not wait for a list. That is the entire point. The work was already done, and a list was never what made it worth doing.

You are able to send this out without anybody's permission, and God has never once required an invitation before He would let somebody be fed. First Corinthians 15:58 tells people to keep abounding in work whose value does not depend on the response, and the Spirit of God is the one who turns a full pot into two doorsteps this week.