Flashback Friday: The Unseen
Every Friday I dig into the archives and dust off an old post. If you haven’t read it, it’s new to you!
They’re all around us.
Every weekend, they show up early and stay late. Driving rain, blazing sun, falling snow, gusting wind. It doesn’t matter. Whatever the weather, no matter the season, they’re there. Unloading trailers. Setting up tables. Sweeping off sidewalks and unfolding chairs and filling communion cups and putting out traffic cones.
But they’re the Unseen. They finish before you show up and start after you leave. By the time you get to church, their job is long done. By the time you’re settling in for a Sunday nap, they’re just packing things away.
They’re the set up crew. They’re the tear down team. And they give literal blood, sweat, and tears week in and week out to prepare elementary school cafeterias, high school auditoriums, steeple-clad churches, historical theaters, and rented convention halls. What you never think about, they must think about. There are procedures to follow, checklists to eyeball, strategies to determine. If they do their job well, you’ll never notice. But if one supply tub goes missing or one area rug gets left behind, they’re suddenly on the radar of every Sunday School teacher or elementary school principal in their zip code.
And that’s the tragedy of the Unseen. Their job is thankless, endless, and monotonous. They have to deal with mis-packed crates and misplaced signs. They don’t have the luxury of not showing up. They don’t have the freedom to knock off early. If the task is to be completed, if the service is to go on, if the classroom is to be ready, it falls on their shoulders.
Perhaps during the week they run a corporation or plod their way through college. But on the weekend, they trade their neckties for tshirts and their textbooks for tech gear. Maybe on Monday through Friday they give orders, but on Saturday and Sunday they take them. And they deliver on them.
They don’t do it because the have to, they do it because they want to. Oh, make no mistake: it has to get done and they don’t always want to. Their service always brings sacrifice. When their alarm blares at 5:30 AM, when they miss yet another Sunday lunch with their friends, when their social life takes a back seat to their servant’s heart, they may choose to be a blessing even when they don’t feel very blessed. And still they show up.
Read the entire original post here.
