I Swept the Barn and Nobody Came to Look

I swept the whole barn on a Saturday and it took two hours and eleven minutes and I did the corners.

The corners are the thing. Anybody can sweep a barn floor. The floor is the easy part and it looks impressive in about twenty minutes, and the corners are where the sweeping actually is, and there are eleven of them if you count the ones behind the stall dividers, which I do.

I did all eleven. I moved the feed bins. I got the stuff out from behind the door that has been behind that door since before I could walk.

And then I stood in the doorway.

I want to be precise about what I was doing in that doorway, because I have thought about it since and it is not flattering. I was waiting for somebody to walk past. Not to be told I had done well. Just for somebody to come round the corner and see it and make a noise.

Nobody came for about forty minutes. My dad was up at the top gate and Mrs. Ames was not coming that day and there was nobody on this farm except me and a barn and a goat who walked across the middle of my clean floor about four minutes in and stood there.

I got quite low about it. That sounds silly and it is exactly what happened, and I have decided to write it down because I do not think anybody tells children that doing a good job and then standing in a doorway is a real experience that happens.

Dad came down at about five. He looked in and said, ah. That was the whole of it. Ah, and then he went and got a bucket and started doing something else in there.

And here is the thing I did not expect. That was enough. I do not entirely understand why one syllable from a man who did not stop walking was enough when forty minutes of imagining a bigger reaction had not been.

Bucky, for the record, had been in and out of that barn six times by then and had made no comment of any kind, and has never once acknowledged a swept floor in his life, and I have stopped expecting him to.

The ruling about the men who stayed

David comes back from a rescue with everything recovered, and there is an argument about who gets what.

Two hundred of his six hundred men had been too exhausted to cross a brook and had stayed with the baggage. Four hundred went on and did the fighting. And the men who fought say, reasonably, that the ones who stayed should get their families back and nothing else.

Then said David, Ye shall not do so, my brethren, with that which the LORD hath given us, who hath preserved us, and given the company that came against us into our hand. For who will hearken unto you in this matter? but as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarrieth by the stuff: they shall part alike. (1 Samuel 30:23, 24)

He that tarrieth by the stuff. That is one of the great phrases in the Bible and it is about people who sat with the luggage.

And the ruling is not a compromise. It is not a smaller share for a smaller job. They shall part alike, which is exactly the same, and the reason given at the front is that the whole thing was given by God in the first place and was never anybody's to allocate by effort.

You are on the same share as the ones who were at the front, and 1 Samuel 30:24 says part alike rather than part fairly. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as being included rather than as being consoled.

The text says it became a statute. Somebody wrote it into the law of that nation, which means it was contested again, which means people have always wanted it to work the other way.

You have not been quietly moved into a lower category by the job you were given. The written word makes that an ordinance rather than a one off kindness, and His Spirit is what makes a settled rule better company than a generous mood.

Who was actually watching the barn

There is a phrase Paul uses to a group of servants that changes who a job is done for.

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; Knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3:23, 24)

Not unto men. That is not an instruction to stop caring whether anybody notices, which is not a thing a person can do on command. It is a statement about who the work was actually addressed to all along.

Which reframes a doorway. Standing there waiting is a person checking whether the letter arrived, at an address the work was never sent to.

You are working at an address that is not the one you have been watching. Colossians 3:23 says as to the Lord and not unto men, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a relief rather than one more thing to get right.

And the word heartily in that verse is literally out of the soul, which means the standard is about how it was done rather than about whether it landed.

You have been given a standard nobody in the yard can assess. Colossians 3:23 measures the doing rather than the reception, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a letter into a boy with a broom.