Tri Robinson, pastor of Vineyard Boise Church in Boise, Idaho, shares the following story:

[Early in my life as a believer] I had become very involved in [my church's] ministry to China. We started to aggressively train and send small teams over to Hong Kong, where we had a full-time contact who arranged the transports across the border. Hong Kong was still independent from China, and Americans were free to come and go at will. To help send our people, we decided to raise money to pay half their airfare and travel expenses. Brent, [a pastor whom I had befriended at the time], had the idea of collecting and selling used newspapers for recycling to raise the money.

We began to implement this idea of recycling newspapers, and we were so successful at it that we managed to raise thousands of dollars over a period of about three years. The only problem was that it took a massive amount of work, and all of it had to be done by volunteers. I was one of those volunteers, and every Sunday after church I took my family to a large retirement complex to do a weekly pickup. We would drive two vehicles to church each Sunday, my truck and our family car. The retirement center was on our way home, so we all would work for about two hours going from building to building picking up the papers that the folks had graciously saved for us. Every Sunday we would fill the bed of my truck with papers. Then Nancy would take the kids home, while I returned to church to empty the truck into a storage shelter.

Doing the job was okay for a while, but after several months it started to get old. Usually there were people at the church to help, but one time I distinctly remember unloading my truck back at the church all by myself. It was hard, unpleasant work, and it was a cold, windy afternoon. I was about halfway through when the thought hit me that I really wasn't having fun and I felt all alone and very unappreciated. I wanted to be noticed; I wanted more than anything else for Brent to drive by and see me laboring away at his stupid fund-raising idea. I was tired of no one knowing I had been doing this job week after week for months. I hated being invisible and I wanted to quit. I threw down a bundle of papers and plopped on top of the growing pile of what seemed a lot like trash. That's when I prayed a prayer of complaint to the Lord, saying, "Please, Jesus, I just want someone to notice me."

And that's when Jesus answered me in his still, small but very clear voice, saying, I do notice you, Tri. You're not invisible to me. It wasn't that he was upset with me or rebuking me; it was just a matter-of-fact but tender comment.

Looking back after all these years (more than thirty now), I believe that single event may have had more to do with my future fruitfulness in public ministry than anything else. We may chafe at being invisible when everything in us wants to be seen and appreciated, but until we learn we are always in full view of God—and that's enough—our lives will never produce a harvest.