Loyal To A Thing That Never Asks

Emilio has been loyal for twenty-two years, and the thing he has been loyal to has never once asked him how he is.

He would find that a strange sentence, and then he would understand it, because he is not a slow man.

He is not talking about people. The people have been fine. Some of them have been good to him and one or two of them have been very good to him, and he has friends out of it and he would not take those back.

He is talking about the arrangement itself. The thing behind the people. The thing that has had his loyalty in a way that no individual person ever asked for, and that has run in him since he was twenty-six, and that he has served in a hundred small ways nobody ever noticed, including on the days when nobody needed him to.

He worked it out at his mother's table, of all places.

She had asked him how he was. That was all. She had asked it the way she asks it, which is properly, with her hand on his arm and no intention of accepting the first answer, and he gave her the first answer and she waited, and he gave her the second one.

And then, driving home, he found himself thinking about the fact that in twenty-two years the other thing had never asked once.

Not once. There has never been a moment where the arrangement turned to him and said, and how are you.

It cannot. That is not a complaint about it; it is simply true of it. It is not a person and it has no capacity. And Emilio has never once expected it to, and he would tell you that he expects nothing from it, and I believe him.

But he has served it as though it could.

That is what he saw on that drive. He has given it the kind of loyalty you give to something that will notice: the extra care, the thing done properly when nobody would know, the standard kept in the dark. That is a beautiful way to work, and it is the right way to work, and it should never be given up.

It is just that he has been giving it to something incapable of receiving it, while his mother, who is capable, has been getting the first answer.

You have your own version. There is something you are loyal to that has never once asked after you, and there is somebody who does ask and gets whatever is left over.

Nobody is calling you a fool. There is nothing foolish about being loyal. It is one of the best things about you and I would not remove it if I could.

But it has been going somewhere it cannot land.

Paul tells slaves who their actual employer is

There is a passage written to people in genuinely hard positions, and the sentence at the end of it is the one that matters.

Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ.Colossians 3:24

Read what he does there. He does not tell them to work less, and he does not tell them the work is beneath them. He redirects the whole thing over the heads of everybody they can see, and lands it on Christ. Ye serve the Lord Christ. The task has not changed. The address has.

And that is worth sitting with, because it means the loyalty is not the problem and never was. It has simply been posted to somewhere with no letterbox.

And now hear what is already true of you. You are already serving Him. Not once the arrangement changes and not once you find better work: the written word says this to people who could not change their circumstances at all, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man driving home from his mother's house.

And you are seen. That is the exact thing the arrangement cannot do and He has been doing the whole twenty-two years. The word calls Him the God who sees, and says that not one cup of cold water goes unnoticed, and the Spirit is the one who makes a man feel noticed rather than merely informed that he is.

Nobody is telling you to be less loyal

I want to be very plain now, because this is the paragraph where a message like this tells a man to withdraw, and I will not.

Nobody here is telling you to stop caring about your work. Do not do a worse job because of anything you read here. Paul's letter, of all the letters, is the one that tells people to do the work heartily, and the reason is not that the work deserves it. The reason is who it is actually being done for.

And nobody is telling you to leave. I do not know your circumstances, who depends on your income, or what a change would cost the people at your table, and a man who preaches a resignation from a safe distance is spending money that is not his.

And nobody is telling you that having less would make you freer. That error costs people just as much from the other side, and it still leaves the amount sitting at the center of a story where it does not belong.

The question is not whether you are loyal.

The question is who is receiving it, because loyalty always goes somewhere, and one of the two places you have been sending it has never once been able to take delivery.

And you already have one Master. Not once things settle: the word says you are not your own, you were bought at a price, and it is the Spirit who bears witness with your spirit that this is done rather than pending.

And the other one has never paid a wage. Not one, in twenty-two years. The written word says riches make themselves wings and fly away, and the Spirit is entirely able to make a man feel the truth of that without one thing being taken off him to prove it.