Fifteen Years of Registers and I Cannot Point at One

You do it on the first day, before anybody arrives, with the chairs still up on the tables.

You sit at the desk with the new register and you go down it, name by name, out loud, one at a time, and you say a blessing over each of them. Thirty names, give or take. It takes about twelve minutes and you have never told a single colleague in fifteen years, because you have a fairly clear idea of how that conversation would go in that staffroom.

Fifteen years. Call it four hundred and fifty names.

You are a good teacher. You know that, in the way a person knows a thing about themselves without needing it confirmed. You are not fishing for anything.

It is the last day of the summer term and the room is empty and you are taking the display down, and you have just gone through the whole exercise in your head, which you do every July, which is: name one.

Name one child, out of four hundred and fifty, where you can point at something and say, that. That happened, and it happened because of the twelve minutes on the first day.

You cannot. You never can. There are children you helped enormously and you know exactly which and you can account for every bit of it in ordinary teacherly terms: attention, a good conversation in Year 9, a phone call to a mother.

Nothing you can trace to the register.

He put the not-in-vain at the end of the resurrection chapter

Sit on that desk a minute. The display can wait and the caretaker is not in until four.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me being clever with a woman in an empty classroom: you have not been doing it wrong. Nothing in this article is going to suggest that a different form of words, or more expectation, or naming something specific over each child, would have produced a result you could trace. Anybody who says that is guessing, and what they are doing is turning four hundred and fifty children into your evidence base, and God has never once done that.

Now come and look at where Paul puts the sentence you need, because the location of it is the whole argument.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

That is the last verse of the resurrection chapter. Fifty-seven verses of argument about the dead being raised, about a body sown in corruption and raised in incorruption, about death being swallowed up, and then, straight out of that, without a paragraph break: therefore your labor is not in vain.

Which tells you what the not-in-vain is resting on. It is not resting on visible results in this term or this decade or this life. It is resting on the resurrection: on there being a day when everything gets raised and everything gets accounted for, and on the fact that nothing done in the Lord goes into the ground and stays there.

Paul is not saying you will see it. He is saying it is not lost.

Four hundred and fifty names are not lost, and the reason they are not lost is a resurrection and not a result you can trace in July. That is not me encouraging a teacher at the end of a hard year. That is what is written, and where the sentence sits in the chapter and what it is built on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on the edge of a desk with the chairs up.

Here is what nobody explains about speaking over children you teach. When you say those words over a register, you are not producing anything in thirty eleven year olds. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about thirty people He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it, and He does not file a report in July, and He has never once required a child to know it happened.

A blessing is not an input, and a July stocktake is not its readout. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29), and the Spirit has never handed a teacher a dataset. What was revealed to you is that a woman speaks good over the people in her care. That you have done, four hundred and fifty times, with the door shut.

What the July exercise is doing

Now let me name it, because it happens every July and it is worth seeing clearly.

What is written never asked that question of a blessing, and the Spirit has never asked it of you. Name one. That is a fair question in a school. It is how you evaluate an intervention, and you are trained to ask it, and asking it about your own practice is a mark of a serious teacher.

But you have been running it on a thing that was never an intervention, and the question does something specific when it comes back empty fifteen times: it does not make you stop believing. It makes you feel slightly foolish, in a staffroom sort of way, and a woman who feels slightly foolish about a private practice eventually finds that the first day of term is very busy and she does not get to it.

That is not unbelief and I will not call it that. It is a professional instinct applied in a place where it does not fit. And what is written never once invited you to audit it, and the Spirit is not sitting in that empty room with a spreadsheet.

God did not ask you to produce traceable outcomes in four hundred and fifty children, and He has never once made a measurable result the grade on a woman's obedience. It is written that it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful (1 Corinthians 4:2), and Paul chose faithful rather than effective, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in this classroom at the end of the summer term, which is why it reads as a job description and not as a comfort.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you that one of them will find you in twenty years and tell you something, and I am not telling you none of them will. I have no authority to promise you a result on four hundred and fifty children and I am not going to trade you one for fifteen years of first days. What God does in them is His, entirely.

What I can put in your hands is this: four hundred and fifty blessings have not come back to God empty, and Paul's word for what happens to them is not *forgotten*, it is *not in vain*. God's word does not come back to Him void (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a woman who has said thirty names out loud on fifteen first mornings has done something heaven wrote down in full.