Who Cut the Ribbon

Two hundred and eighty dollars of his own money for the rebar, which he has told nobody and does not intend to.

He poured it in March. March, in that county, means you pour in a four day window when the ground has given up the frost and before the rain arrives, and he watched the forecast for eleven days waiting for it, and then took two days off work he could not comfortably take.

The reason it needed doing is that a woman named Dolores had stopped coming, and had said it was her knees, and it was her knees, and it was also nine steps and no handrail and a lot of pride about being helped up them.

He did the forms himself. He did the grade at one in twelve, which is more work than one in ten and is the number that actually gets a wheelchair up without somebody pushing. He put a landing at the turn, which nobody asked for and which doubled the concrete.

That was March.

In August the thing is finished, because there was a railing to source and a delay, and there is a small event in the parking lot with lemonade, and a man who joined the church in June and who has been extremely energetic about getting the railing finished cuts a ribbon that somebody has tied across it, and there is a round of applause and a photograph.

He is standing at the back with a cup in his hand, and Dolores goes up the ramp for the first time under her own power, and does not need pushing, because of one in twelve, and there is a moment where she gets to the top and turns around and everybody claps and she is trying not to make a thing of it.

That is the moment worth having and he had it. He wants that on the record before anything else in this article.

And also, on the drive home, something sat in his chest that he has not been able to name for four months, and it is not about the man with the scissors, who is a good man and did in fact get the railing sorted when it had been stuck.

It is closer to this: the ramp now has a story attached to it, and the story starts in June.

You will have your own ribbon. The thing you built that has since acquired a history that begins after you.

What Paul does to the whole question

There is a passage in Corinthians written for a church that had split into fan clubs, and Paul takes the entire question apart in one sentence.

So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.1 Corinthians 3:7

Notice how radical the move is. The Corinthians were arguing about which minister was the important one, and everybody expected Paul to say, in effect, we are all important in our own way. He does not do that.

He says neither of them is anything.

That sounds harsh for about two seconds and then it becomes the most restful sentence in the chapter, because look at what it removes. If neither the planter nor the waterer is anything, then the question of which one gets the ribbon is not a difficult question. It is a question with no object in it. There is nothing there to allocate.

So take it plainly: you are not in a contest that exists, and that is what 1 Corinthians 3 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an argument about preachers in a Greek city and lays it down in a parking lot with lemonade in it.

Which is worth sitting in for a moment, because the relief in it is not the relief of being told you came out fine after all. It is the relief of a scale being taken off the table. A man who has spent four months quietly wondering where he ranks has been carrying an object that was never there, and setting it down does not require him to have won. You have been carrying a weight with nothing inside it, and the written word is what empties it rather than my saying so, and His Spirit is the one who makes an emptied thing actually feel lighter rather than only sound lighter.

And notice that Paul does not devalue the work. Two verses later he says each will receive according to his labor, and he talks at length about building carefully and about what materials a person uses. He is not saying the work is nothing. He is saying the worker is not the thing being weighed against another worker, which is a completely different claim and is the one that undoes the drive home.

Because what sat in his chest was not a claim about concrete. The concrete is fine. The concrete is exactly where he put it, at one in twelve, with a landing at the turn. What sat in his chest was a question about position, and Paul's answer is that there is no position, for anybody, including the man with the scissors.

You have been building something real while standing nowhere in particular, because the written word puts the growth entirely in God's hands and leaves the builders unranked, and His Spirit is what makes that land on a man four months later.

Nobody is the real one

Now the guardrail, because there is a way of using that section that would be worse than the problem.

The man who joined in June is not a lesser figure in this story. He got the railing finished, and the railing was stuck for four months, and without it Dolores would still be on the nine steps. That is not a small contribution dressed up. That is the thing that actually completed it.

And the man at the back is not the more faithful of the two. That sentence is not available. There is no league table here, and pouring in March does not outrank sourcing a railing in July, and a rebar receipt in a wallet is not a claim on anything.

If this article leaves anybody quietly satisfied at being the unsung one, then something has gone wrong, because unsung has quietly become a position, and Paul just abolished positions.

So: you have nothing to win in that parking lot and nothing that anyone took, because a crown in Scripture is placed on a head and never earned, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You are held by a regard that did not change when the ribbon was cut, and the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what keeps it from wearing thin by August.