The Ones Who Came at Five

Delphine found out in the same email as everybody else, which is the detail she keeps coming back to, more than a year later.

Twelve years. She had been there twelve years. She had done the rota when nobody would do the rota. She had driven the van. She had stayed behind after the thing on the Thursday and stacked the chairs on her own more times than she could count, and she had never once mentioned it, because mentioning it would have spoiled it, and because she genuinely did not do it to be seen.

That last part is true, and it is important, and it is also not the whole truth, and Delphine is honest enough to know it.

Because somewhere underneath the twelve years there had been a quiet, unspoken, never once articulated understanding. Not with anybody in the building. With God. The understanding was that this was going somewhere. That the twelve years were, in some way she had never let herself put into a sentence, a deposit.

The email said that the role she had wanted for six years had been given to a woman who had joined in February.

Delphine read it at her desk at work. She said, out loud, to nobody, oh, that's lovely, and meant about forty percent of it. She sent a message with an exclamation mark in it. And then she went and sat in her car in a car park for twenty-five minutes and did not turn the radio on.

What she felt was not disappointment. Disappointment would have been manageable, and it would have been decent.

What she felt was that she had been cheated, and directly behind that, arriving before she could get out of its way, came the shame. Because what kind of person feels that. And what kind of person who has served for twelve years turns out to have been keeping an invoice the whole time.

She did not tell anybody for a fortnight.

What finally undid her was her neighbor, of all people, an older woman who knows nothing about any of it, who saw her getting out of the car one evening and said: come and have a cup of tea. Not now, if you're busy. Any time. There's no occasion needed, love, you can just come.

There's no occasion needed. You can just come.

Delphine stood on a driveway with her keys in her hand and found that her face had gone, and she could not have explained it to a single person in that building.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the role.

She thought: I have been working twelve years for an occasion, and somebody has just told me there is never one required.

Let me say the word properly

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman sitting in a car park.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a position, not what is owed. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping given to the people whose twelve years did not pay out.

Let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting a role is not a sin, and twelve years of the rota is not vanity. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire is not run here and never will be. If you are genuinely short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is a real thing and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

And one more thing before we go further. Whoever taught you that the years were a deposit, and somebody did, in a sermon or an atmosphere or a family that simply assumed it, is not on trial here. I do not know their name and I would not use it. What I want to look at is the deposit itself, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

The most uncomfortable story Jesus ever told about work

He tells it about a vineyard and a day's hiring, and He tells it, crucially, to people He loves, not to enemies.

Some men were hired at first light. Others were picked up through the day, and the last of them were standing in the marketplace at five in the afternoon, which in that economy meant they had stood there all day and nobody had wanted them and their families were not going to eat. At the end of the day the owner pays the five o'clock men the same as the sunrise men, and the sunrise men say something entirely reasonable, which is: this is not fair.

But he replied to one of them, Friend, I am doing you no wrong. Did you not agree with me for a denarius? Take what belongs to you and go. I choose to give to this last worker as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?Matthew 20:13-15

Read the first word. Friend. He does not call the man greedy. He does not throw him off the land. He calls him friend and then asks him a question, and the question is not about the man's work ethic. It is about which system he thinks he is standing in.

You are not a small person for what you felt in that car park. You are a woman who was working inside one system while a completely different one was running, and the written word says the difference out loud rather than leaving anybody to guess at it. I am not putting my own idea on you here. That is what Scripture says, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person hear the word friend in a car park as kindness instead of as a telling off.

And here is the sentence underneath the whole story: the owner was never being unfair to the first men. He was being generous to the last ones, and generosity always looks like unfairness from the position of somebody who has been counting.

What the twelve years were actually doing

You have been in the vineyard the whole time, and the vineyard was never a payroll. His word says the owner does what he chooses with what belongs to him, present tense, not pending and not up for negotiation, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a life rather than a phrase in a book.

Think about what actually broke you open. It wasn't the email. You'd half known for months.

It was a woman on a driveway saying there's no occasion needed, love, you can just come. It was somebody offering you a door that had nothing to do with anything you had done. You were starving to be wanted without an occasion. You still are, and there is nothing grasping about it.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Not one hour of the twelve years is lost, and not one hour of it was a deposit, and those two things are both true at the same time. Jesus watched a woman put in a tiny amount that nobody in the building noticed and said so out loud to His friends, which tells you exactly how closely the seen and the unseen are being watched, and He was in the passenger seat of that car for the whole twenty-five minutes.