Daily Devotions

1 Where we are

The compressor gave out on Thursday and the part only comes on Monday. It is half past two on Saturday, the shopping crowd four deep, the steam wand adding heat to a room already at thirty-four degrees. Wei Kiat is thirty-one and his shirt is stuck to his back. A drink comes back over the counter: wrong milk. He apologises and makes it again. Nothing happens. Then there are still three hours. Underneath the flat face is something heavier than temper. He believes he is only as good as his last shift, that eleven steady months would be wiped out by one bad afternoon, and that nobody is counting the good ones.

2 What the passage is doing

Paul is writing a second time to a young church in Thessalonica, pressed from outside and confused inside. Some there had stopped working altogether, sure the end was near, and were living off other people. Paul points to his own nights of manual labour, paying for his own bread so as not to be a burden to anyone. Then he turns to everybody else, the ones already quietly turning up, and says: as for you, do not go slack in doing the good thing.

3 Taking it with you

If you are the one working beside him, hear this about yourself first. Long before you did a single decent thing, Christ spent years in an ordinary workshop with no crowd watching, and then died where nobody applauded, and God counted every bit of it and raised him. That is what your standing rests on. Not your last shift. Not the afternoon you nearly snapped. So the temper you hold at half past two, in a room no one is inspecting, is not nothing much. It is real, and it is seen. And when the man next to you makes that drink again, you can tell him it was well made.