Nobody Sees Me Do This

The house is empty when you do it.

Not on purpose, at first. It was just when you were in. And then it stayed that way, and now it is the arrangement, and it has been for a long time.

Nobody in that house knows you water those. If you stopped, it would be about three weeks before anybody noticed anything, and what they would notice is the plants, not the absence of you doing something.

And you are not bitter about that. That is worth saying clearly, because it would be easy to read this as a complaint and it is not one.

It is more that you have started to wonder whether a thing that nobody knows about is actually happening.

Thy Father which seeth in secret

Jesus says something three times in one passage, and the repetition is the point.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6:6, King James Version)

Thy Father which seeth in secret.

You are watched by somebody for whom an empty house is not an obstacle, and nothing done with nobody there has ever once gone unobserved. Matthew 6:6 says thy Father which seeth in secret, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man watering plants in a house with nobody in it.

Notice the construction. Thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret.

He is described as being there, in that place, in the closed room with the door shut. Not looking in from outside. Present in the secret part, which is where He evidently prefers to be.

And the reward language is not the interesting half. The interesting half is that secrecy is treated as the natural habitat of the thing rather than as a problem to be compensated for.

You were never operating in a blind spot, and a room with the door shut has never once been outside where God actually is. The Spirit of God is what makes that a felt fact rather than a doctrine, and Matthew 6 is where the secret is written down.

What an unwitnessed act is

Now the practical half, and it is about the question itself. Whether a thing nobody knows about is actually happening.

It is, obviously. The plants are watered. The evidence is in the room. Nothing about the existence of the act depends on anybody observing it.

But that is not the real question, and it is worth saying what the real one is.

You are asking whether it counts. Whether an act that produces no acknowledgment goes anywhere, accumulates anywhere, means anything beyond the water reaching the soil.

You are asking a real question about whether unseen things accumulate, and no act done with nobody there has ever once fallen out of the record. What is written in Matthew 6:6 places God inside the closed room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who answers a question that sounds self pitying and is not.

And here is what is worth knowing about the arrangement in that house.

It is not that they do not value it. It is that they do not know. Those are entirely different, and they have been carried as one thing for a while now.

Nobody has failed to thank you. Nobody has been given the opportunity.

You have not been overlooked by anybody in that house, and a thing nobody knows about has never once been a thing anybody declined to notice. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that distinction clean, and Matthew 6 is the ground under it.

Do it again and say nothing

So here is the instruction and it is deliberately not a solution.

Do it again this week when the house is empty. And do not mention it afterward.

I am not going to tell you to tell them. There is a version of this article that ends with go and let your family know you do this, and that version would be a mistake, because it would turn a thing that is quietly good into a grievance with a conversation attached.

Telling them one day would be fine. But not this week, and not as the resolution of this. Do it again, in the empty house, on purpose, knowing that nobody will know.

You are able to do it one more time with nobody there, and an act performed knowing it will not be seen has never once been a smaller act than one performed in company. Matthew 6:6 puts the Father inside the shut room, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man in an empty house on a Tuesday afternoon.