Ten Years of Sunday Mornings

You still have the box. The one with the felt shapes in it, which nobody has asked for since about 2019 and which you cannot bring yourself to throw out.

Ten years. Two rooms. Roughly a hundred and eighty children, if you did the arithmetic, and you did do the arithmetic once, at about year seven, on the back of a register.

Some of them you remember perfectly. The boy who asked whether God got tired. The girl who cried about her hamster and would not be comforted by anything except being allowed to keep crying about her hamster. The twins who could not be sat together.

They are teenagers now, most of them, and adults, some of them. You see them occasionally in the town. They say hello politely and go past.

Not one of them has ever come back and told you it mattered.

That is not a complaint. You would be embarrassed to say it out loud and you have never said it out loud. Nobody teaches a Sunday class for compliments and you did not sign up for feedback.

But it is Saturday night, and you are cutting out shapes at the kitchen table for tomorrow, and there is a thought that has been arriving more often this year than it used to: that you have spent ten years talking to children about God and have absolutely no evidence that a single word of it went in.

The verse is about God's memory, not yours

There is a line in Hebrews that is almost startling when you read it slowly.

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 what it actually says. It does not say your work will succeed. It does not say you will be told about it. It says God would have to be unrighteous to forget it, which is another way of saying that forgetting it is not something He is capable of.

That is a claim about His character rather than a promise about your results, and it is stronger than a promise about results, because results can be misread and character cannot be revoked.

You have been kept in a record you were never given access to. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, Hebrews 6:10, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a rest rather than a consolation prize on a Saturday night with the scissors out.

Feedback is not the same as fruit

Here is what a decade of silence quietly teaches, and it teaches it without ever saying it.

It teaches that no news is bad news. That is not a spiritual conclusion, it is a conclusion from working life, where a thing that produced results would have produced a report by now.

But children do not report. That is not a flaw in your class, it is a fact about children, and it is a fact about most of what matters. A person does not come back at twenty-three to tell a woman that the reason they still believe God is not angry with them is a thing she said about a hamster in 2017.

The absence of a report is not the absence of a result. Those are two entirely different things and the last decade has been quietly merging them.

You are not looking at evidence, you are looking at the ordinary silence of things that grow slowly. Scripture says the kingdom of God is as if a man should cast seed into the ground and the seed springs up he knoweth not how, Mark 4:26-27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works in a life for twenty years without filing an update.

And nothing here is a promise

I am not going to tell you they all turn out well. That is not mine to say and it would be a lie in a kind voice, and you would know it.

Some of those hundred and eighty will walk with God and some will not, and none of that is in your hands, and none of it has ever been a report card on a woman with a box of felt shapes.

What I can tell you is what is actually settled. You are not being assessed on whether it worked. Scripture says one plants, another waters, but God gives the increase, 1 Corinthians 3:6-7, and the Holy Spirit put the increase on His own side of the ledger before you cut out your first shape.

The box you cannot throw out

And there is the box, which nobody has asked for since 2019.

You keep it because throwing it out would feel like a verdict. Like agreeing with the quiet.

You are allowed to keep it, and you are allowed to throw it out, and neither of those is a statement about your faith. It is a box of felt.

But it is worth noticing what the box is doing. It is standing in for the reassurance nobody has ever given you, and Scripture already gave it in writing, Hebrews 6:10, and the Holy Spirit does not require a plastic crate in a cupboard to hold a promise up.

You have already been told, in writing, that this is not forgotten. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget, Hebrews 6:10, and the Holy Spirit did not put that verse in the Bible for the people who get thanked.