service

I was sad to hear that Hayward’s Heath Baptist Church has lost another faithful servant.  Les Ridd, another who served on the leadership team with me, died at the end of last week.  Like Dick, he had been ill for a while, but it doesn’t make it easier.

I was thinking about Les and Dick, and what they gifted to the church, and found it simplest to put my thoughts down into one of my occasional not-poem things.

There are plenty of noisy servants.

“Where there are many words,” said the Teacher,

“sin is not far behind.”

(Loud men and women, we know who we are)

Many words booming from the pulpit,

or clattering onto the page

like a skip full of scrap metal.

“I tell you the truth,” says Jesus.

“They have received their reward in full.”

But there are also the quiet servants,

whom you have never heard,

and will maybe never even see,

(certainly not in a photo on the back of a book)

doing what they do on tiptoe.

Stacking chairs, cutting and sticking with children,

giving lifts and clearing out guttering silently in the background.

“I tell you the truth,” says Jesus.

“For them, the best is yet to come.”