Daily Devotions

1 Where we are

Xin Yi is thirty-three, and she does the academy's payroll and the grant reports. At twenty to eight on Thursday she is on the bus along Upper Serangoon with a plastic bag of unclaimed receipts on her lap, coming off nine hours of reconciling figures that no Restarter will ever see. Nobody said anything when she left, because there was nothing to say. What she wants is not praise exactly. She wants some evidence that she was in the room. Underneath is an old sum she has been doing since school: what she produces is what she is worth, and if the output is never counted, then neither is she.

2 What the passage is doing

Nehemiah comes back to Jerusalem after time away at the Persian court and finds the temple storerooms cleared out. The Levites and the singers — the people who keep the place running and whose work nobody applauds — have quietly gone back to their fields, because they were not being paid. He confronts the officials, restocks the stores, and appoints treasurers who can be trusted. Then, in the middle of an administrative report, he stops and prays a single line asking God to keep the account himself.

3 Taking it with you

You may be the one working beside someone like her, and you know exactly how little of what she does is visible. Here is what is already true before you do anything about it: God keeps a ledger nobody can shred. The Bible bothers to name gatekeepers and metalworkers because heaven counts differently from the office. And Christ himself spent thirty unwatched years in a workshop before a single crowd formed, and his Father's love for him was full the whole time — which is where your own worth sits, not in output. So go in today and name one thing she did by name. Not to give her worth. To tell her the truth.