The Floor Buffer At Two A.M.

The buffer has a bad caster on the front left, so it pulls, and Efrain has been correcting for that pull with his right hip for so long that his right hip has an opinion about it now.

Second floor, county hospital, rooms one through twenty two. Eleven at night to seven in the morning. He starts at the end by the stairwell and works down, and it takes him until about half past two if nobody spills anything and until later if somebody does.

He says a sentence at every door.

Not out loud. Under his breath, or barely even that, more like the shape of it in his mouth. Lord, whoever is in there tonight. That is mostly it. Sometimes he adds a word if he knows who it is, and on the second floor of a county hospital in a town this size he usually does. Lord, whoever is in there tonight.

He started doing it nine years ago. His mother was in room nine for eleven days and the man who buffed those floors then was called Wallace, and Wallace was a big slow man with terrible knees who used to nod at the door of every room like he was greeting somebody. Efrain asked him once. Wallace said, I say a word. That is all he said about it, and then he retired, and then Efrain got the shift, and Efrain started saying a word.

For the first few years it did something in him. He could tell you exactly what it did. There would be a kind of warmth around the middle of the corridor, and some nights he would find he had stopped pushing the buffer and was just standing there in the half dark with his hand on the handle.

That went away. He could not tell you when.

Four years now, maybe five. He still says it at every door. Lord, whoever is in there tonight. And nothing happens. Nothing at all, not a flicker, not a lift, not the corridor warmth, nothing. Just a tired man with a bad caster saying eleven words twenty two times a night to a corridor that does not answer.

And here is what he has started to think, in the last year especially, and it sits on him worse than the tiredness. He has started to think it might be dishonest. That there is a name for a man who goes on doing a religious thing with nothing behind it, and the name is not a good one. He thinks about stopping. He has thought about it a lot. He does not stop, because he does not know how to walk past room nine without saying it, but he is not proud of that either. He has decided the not stopping is probably just a habit, and he has decided that a habit is not the same as faith, and he has been fairly harsh with himself about the difference.

Tonight the buffer is at room fourteen, about ten past two, and Marisol from nights comes down the hall with a linen cart. It is her last week. She is transferring to the other campus.

She says: you are the one who says something at the doors.

Efrain says: what.

She says: my husband's mother was in eleven, three years ago, the winter. I used to take my break at two. You would come down this hall and you would stop at every door and say something, and I would sit on that bench right there and time it.

Efrain says: I never knew anybody could hear it.

She says: I could not hear it. I could see it. And she moves the cart past him and says, over her shoulder, without any weight on it at all: I was not praying that year. That was the only praying I was near.

Then she is gone through the double doors, and the corridor is exactly as empty as it was before, and the buffer hums the way it does.

He does not feel anything. He waits a second, the way you do, to see whether he is going to. He does not.

He does room fifteen anyway.

You know this from your own side of it. Somewhere there is a small faithful thing you have gone on doing long after it stopped doing anything to you, and you have quietly started grading yourself for it, and the grade is not good. So take this first, before any explaining. You are faithful today in what you actually did, and the flatness has no bearing on whether it counted. That is not me being generous with your record. It is what stands written about how God regards this exact kind of work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that and gets it past a man's private verdict on himself.

Your part sits inside a people's covenant

The plain thing first, because it changes the size of the question.

When Scripture calls the church a bride, it is not describing a private romance between Jesus and one person, and it is not describing a mood you are supposed to sustain. The bride is the church: one whole people, across every nation and every century, an enormous company of ordinary people doing small things. Christ committed Himself to that people, and the covenant is carried from His side. Your part is a part. It is real, and it matters, and it was never the thing holding the whole arrangement up. You are inside a covenant that is kept by Christ, and your night shift is not what is keeping it. Scripture puts the keeping on Him from beginning to end, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on that rather than a reward for a good week.

That is the frame. Now look at what God says about the small work itself, because He is not vague about it.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

Read the strange construction in the middle of that. Not unrighteous to forget. The writer could have said God is kind enough to remember, or gracious enough, or good enough. He says God is not unrighteous. He makes the remembering a matter of God's justice.

That is an enormous thing to say and it lands exactly where a tired man needs it. Justice is not a mood. Justice does not have a slow week. A God who is not unrighteous to forget your work is a God for whom the remembering is not an act of sentiment that might or might not be available on a given night. It is what He is like, permanently, whether the corridor is warm or empty. You have work that is on record with a God who is not unrighteous, and the record does not thin out on the nights you feel nothing. That is what stands written in Hebrews 6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it a fact about tonight instead of a nice idea about somebody's better years.

And notice the plural He puts it in. Ye have ministered to the saints. The saints, plural, a people. The small thing was never being done in a private booth between one person and God. It was being done inside a company and toward a company, which is why it is on the same page as covenant language and not on a page about personal devotion.

Dry is not distance

Now the thing that has to be said carefully, because getting it wrong has hurt a great many faithful people.

The dryness is not a verdict. It is not evidence that something died, it is not the low reading on a spiritual instrument, and it is not sin. Nowhere does Scripture teach that the presence of feeling is the presence of God or that its absence is His absence. The psalms are full of men doing the right thing with nothing in the tank and saying so out loud in the text.

And the answer to it is not to manufacture something. That is the trap, and it is a cruel one, because a man who believes his faithfulness is only real when it is warm will start producing warmth, and produced warmth is a great deal more dishonest than a flat sentence said at a door. You are not being asked to feel your way back into standing, and there is nothing to work up. His word ties the whole matter to what God is like rather than to what you can generate, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the moving, on His own timing, which nobody schedules and nobody performs.

So the suspicion that eleven flat words at a door are a kind of lying has it exactly backwards. A lie is saying what is not so. Lord, whoever is in there tonight is entirely so. It is true at two in the morning in a dry year in the same way it was true in the warm year. The man saying it has not changed his claim. He has only stopped enjoying it.