Two Mites and Nobody Noticed

She does the flowers, and she has done the flowers since nineteen ninety something, and that is only where the list starts.

She washes the cloths. She has washed the communion cloths for thirty years and she has never told a single person that she takes them home, and there was a stretch of about four years when the machine was going and she did them by hand in a sink.

She locks up on a Thursday. She has a key that three vicars have not known she has.

She rings the two women who do not come any more, every fortnight, and one of them is difficult and the other one is not, and she has never mentioned either call to anybody.

She is sixty-seven.

And what has arrived, gradually, in the last couple of years, is not resentment. She would be appalled by resentment and she has examined herself for it. It is something quieter and stranger.

It is the thought that unwitnessed things might not be anywhere.

Not that she should have been thanked. She would hate to be thanked. It is that thirty years of things nobody saw begin, at sixty-seven, to feel a bit like they never happened, and she has caught herself wondering whether God's noticing works the way she assumed, or whether that was something she believed at thirty and has never tested.

The scene in the treasury

There is a moment in the temple that is worth reading slowly, and the important thing about it is a question of how it got recorded at all.

And he saw also a certain poor widow casting in thither two mites. And he said, Of a truth I say unto you, that this poor widow hath cast in more than they all.Luke 21:2-4

Two mites. The smallest coins there were. Dropped into a treasury in a courtyard with a great many people in it, all of them busy, all of them doing their own transactions.

Nobody saw her. That is the point of the story. Not one person in that court noticed a poor woman putting in the least amount that could be put in.

And it is in the Bible.

Think about what has to be true for that to be in the Bible. Somebody was watching. Somebody was watching so carefully that He knew the denomination, and knew it was all she had, and thought it worth stopping His day and saying out loud.

You are watched by Someone who noticed two of the smallest coins in a crowded courtyard. That is not me finding an encouraging application; Luke 21:2 records an act nobody else observed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a scene from a treasury and lays it over thirty years of communion cloths washed in a sink.

What He said about the amount

And then look at the second half, because it goes further than being noticed.

This poor widow hath cast in more than they all.

He does not say her gift was precious in its own small way. He does not offer her a consolation category. He makes a comparative claim, out loud, in front of people, and He says her two coins outweighed the whole of the rest of the day's giving.

That is a valuation, and it is not the valuation anybody standing in that court would have made, because they had the figures and He had something else.

You have been measured by a scale that is not the visible one, and the visible one has never once been His. The written word has Him overturning the obvious arithmetic in public, and the Holy Spirit is not limited to what a congregation can observe about a woman.

And now let me deal with the real question, which is subtler than being thanked and I want to honor it. You are asking whether unwitnessed things exist.

They do, and the evidence is the passage itself. Her mites were unwitnessed by everybody in that courtyard, and thirty seconds later they were the most consequential thing that happened there, and two thousand years later they are still being read out on Sundays.

You are not doing things that vanish, and nothing you have done in thirty years has gone anywhere. Scripture kept the record of an act nobody saw, and the Holy Spirit has been the witness in a church kitchen on every Thursday of it.