In The Seven-Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton comments that good people are usually hidden. Several years later, I’ve become convinced he’s right. Olive convinced me.
Olive grew up poor, in rural West Virginia, in a shotgun house that rattled every time the train went by. She married young, and her husband died suddenly, leaving her a house full of kids. As Olive neared retirement age, she had no money to speak of, so she took a job in a nursing home. She would walk to work, stiff from her arthritis, descend to the sweltering laundry room, and wash linens soiled by the old and incontinent.
Olive would also baby-sit. She’d walk into our house like Mary Poppins, laden with bags of crafts and videos. Crying babies were music to her; she’d take a caterwauling infant, place it on her ample bosom and magically soothe it to sleep.
I would drive Olive home and watch her climb with difficulty to her second-floor apartment. Many times I would shake my head. I have seen Olive worried—about medical bills—but I’ve never heard her complain. I’ve never seen her anything but sunny and grateful for her lot. Then the Holy Spirit would convict me: I have a Christian workplace and health coverage, and yet I’m routinely ungrateful and burning with frustration over something petty. I was in the presence of someone good, and her very life flushed out what was not good in me.
Yes, God hides the good. He seems to delight in placing his treasures not in a display case but in a dark corner of a drawer.
God could have gained maximum notice for his Son by sending him to Rome, Milan, Carthage, or Alexandria—at least Jerusalem. Instead, he sent his Son to a village so boorish that the locals quipped, “Can anything good come from there?”
But rather than try to overcome this disadvantage, Jesus seeks to avoid the big show. He tells a man he’s healed from a disfiguring case of leprosy, “Don’t tell anyone about this” (Mk. 1:44). When he feeds an entire convention with one sack lunch, it’s his grand moment: the people want to make him king. He walks away (Jn. 6:15).
The thought of being hidden— unnoticed, and overlooked—slays us. We know it would serve the purposes of God if our picture were in the conference brochure.
Most of us can endure being unnoticed for a time. We write the fantasy headline: “Gifted Person Who Labored in Obscurity for Years Now Tapped for Major Spot.” But when God hides us for years on end, and when others are praised and promoted and invited, it feels like our life is worthless.
But would recognition increase our goodness?
Malcolm Muggeridge writes in Something Beautiful for God, when Mother Teresa took her vows, “This was the end of her biography and the beginning of her life. The wholly dedicated, like Mother Teresa, do not have biographies. Biographically speaking, nothing happens to them. To live for and in others … is to eliminate happenings which are factors of the ego and the will.”
Good people are usually hidden. This truth gives us wisdom: when certain gifts rightly attract attention, we won’t make the fatal American equation that being known is better. Enjoyable, yes, and necessary, sometimes, but spiritually hazardous. The fact we still long to be noticed is evidence enough that it would only harm us spiritually.
If we’re hidden, we’re not forgotten by God. He places us, as Oswald Chambers writes, “where we may bring him the most glory, and we are no judges of where that is.”
Kevin A. Miller is editor-at-large of Leadership.
Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today,/Leadership journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership.
