Wednesday of Week 11 in Ordinary Time
2 Kgs 2:1,6-14
Mt 6:1-6,16-18
“But when you give alms, your left hand must not know what your right hand is doing; your almsgiving must be secret, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you.”
There is a sentence in this passage that I have been turning over for some time – ‘Your Father who sees in secret’. Not the colleagues who notice. Not the management committee who reviews. Not the small audience who might one day applaud. The Father. In secret. He sees.
As I reflect on this passage, I felt seen in a way I rarely allow myself to feel.
Most days, I sit with a quiet contradiction. I lead a team in Singapore and I look after a colleague in Dubai. I am trying to build something there — slowly, carefully — opening doors for the bank in a market that asks for patience and presence. I help other relationship managers when their cases get complex, when they need a second opinion on a structure, or a difficult client conversation. I take on ad hoc projects when they come — not because I went looking for them, but because someone asked and I could not see a reason to say ‘no’. None of this is glamorous. Most of it is invisible. And when recognition does come, I find myself almost flinching from it.
I have wondered for a long time why I flinch.
Some of it is temperament. I have never liked applause for the work itself. The work is its own thing — done because it needed to be done. To stand up afterwards and accept credit for it feels like betraying the spirit in which the work was done.
Some of it is honesty. I am paid by the bank to do this. To accept loud praise for doing what I am paid to do feels disproportionate.
And some of it, if I am being fully honest, is fear. Fear of being seen as the man who promotes himself. Fear of becoming one of those voices in the room who talks loudly about responsibilities, commitments, contributions. I would rather under-claim a hundred times than over-claim once.
This passage is beginning to answer something in me — Your Father who sees in secret.
Jesus is not saying that visibility is bad. He is saying that visibility is the wrong thing to live for. He is saying that there is a Father who watches, who notices, who knows the precise shape of every quiet effort — every late evening on a colleague’s deal, every difficult conversation absorbed without complaint, every piece of work done cleanly with the outcome left to fall where it fell. The Father sees the work that the office never sees. He sees the motive behind it, which is the part the office cannot weigh.
I want to be honest about something else, because this passage seems to be pulling everything quiet in my life into one place.
The work at the office is one register of unseen faithfulness. There is another I have been living in this past week and a half, that nobody at the office has fully seen.
My wife was in the ICU on Saturday, 6 June. Four days later, on the night of the 10th, she was back. On Thursday the 11th, she went in for her ablation. The children still needed a father who was steady. The household still needed to function. My mother-in-law still needed to be driven to visit her own daughter. Work still needed its share of me, because the deals and the team and the colleague in Dubai do not pause for any of this. I moved through those days like a man carrying water in both hands and trying not to spill.
I could not have carried it alone. I do not want to write this reflection without saying that plainly.
Every time a crisis has reached our door, my parents have been there. When my wife is admitted, the children and I move in with them — immediately, without ceremony, without needing to ask twice. Their home simply opens, and ours folds into it. They take the children, hold the routines, keep the small world of our family turning while I am at the hospital. They do it without fuss and without keeping any kind of score. They simply show up — because that is who they are, and because that is what they have always done. It is the same passage we are reading. They have lived it long before I read it as Scripture. They give in secret. They serve without announcement. They do not need to be thanked, and they would be embarrassed if I made too much of it. The Father, I am sure, sees them too.
I have learnt how to give without performance because I watched my parents do it first. The reflex did not come from a book. It came from a home. I was shown, over years, that love does not need an audience. My father and mother taught me that lesson without ever sitting me down to teach it.
Almost nobody outside our home knows the full shape of these past days. I did not make it a public thing. I did not ask the office to weigh it. I did not announce the cost of those hours. I simply absorbed them — one drive, one phone call, one decision at a time. The clients still got served. The children still got put to bed by their grandparents, when I could not be there. The wife still got held. The mother-in-law still got brought to the hospital. Nobody was keeping a ledger of any of it except, I am beginning to trust, the Father.
This is what the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing actually looks like in my life. Not abstract piety. Not a principle in a book. It is choosing not to perform the weight of a season, because performing it would distract from carrying it. It is letting the Father be the only one who sees the full picture.
He is not just an observer. He is a Father. He is pleased. He sees the man, not just the output. He sees the choosing-not-to-claim. He sees the long quiet hours in hospital corridors, the conversations I had with the children to keep them steady, the silences I kept at work to keep things moving, the prayers I whispered between car parks and meeting rooms. None of it fell into a void.
And He sees my wife.
I cannot write about quiet giving without writing about her, because she may be the purest example of it in our home. She runs about endlessly — for the children, for her mother, for everyone who needs her — and she does it without complaint. She does not announce her tiredness. She does not tally her sacrifices. She simply pours out, day after day, in a hundred unrecorded ways. And she does all this while carrying yet another load most people never see: she is a graduate student preparing for her PhD. In July she travels to Amsterdam to present a paper at an international conference on gerontology — the study of caring for the aged. There is something fitting in that. She studies, academically, the very thing she already lives daily without footnotes or citations — the quiet care of others.
If I am honest, that endless pouring out is part of why her body has paid the price it has. The very giving that makes her who she is has cost her health. She gave past the point where she should have stopped, because stopping never occurred to her. There is something heartbreaking in that, and something holy too — and I hold both truths at once, even as I pray she learns to let herself be carried for a while.
And here is a thought I have been turning over since the hospital. As proud as I am of her Amsterdam trip, I have quietly carried a fear about it — the fear that something could happen to her health far from home, in another country, away from her doctors and away from me. I cannot claim to know the mind of God. But maybe our Heavenly Father, who sees in secret, saw that fear too. Maybe He allowed the ablation to happen now — weeks before she boards that flight — so that she travels mended, rather than vulnerable. What felt like crisis may, from His vantage point, have been mercy arriving on schedule. I do not say this with certainty. I say it with gratitude, and with a deepening trust that the timing of our trials is never as random as it feels from inside them.
She is also fully with me in the deeper conviction beneath all of this. The values we want to plant in our children — giving without proclamation, serving without scorekeeping, loving without an audience — are not mine alone. They are ours. She nurtures them in our children daily, in the way she speaks to them, the way she shows up for people, the way she never teaches the lesson out loud but simply lives it in front of them. Children do not learn quiet giving from sermons. They learn it from watching their mother run about for others and never once hear her ask for credit.
There is a plan in motion now to co-live on the same plot as my parents. Same plot, but separate entrances, separate kitchens, separate households. Close, but not intrusive. My wife is fully on board — not as a concession to me, but as a shared conviction, because she sees what I see: that this is how the example gets passed on. The arrangement itself is an outworking of this same passage — generosity with healthy edges, presence without imposition, family that is near without being overbearing. My parents will be a few steps away when we need them. We will be a few steps away when they need us. And our children will grow up watching quiet giving from every direction — their grandparents carrying without complaint, their mother pouring out without proclamation, their father working without claim. They will see that love can be quiet and steady and still build something lasting. I learnt this from one generation. My children will learn it from two, lived out daily on either side of a shared plot of land.
I do not need to learn how to claim more. I need to learn how to rest more — to rest in the fact that I do not work in the dark. I work, and I give, and I carry, in front of a Father who already sees, who already knows, and who has already decided I am His.
The reward Jesus speaks of is not, I think, primarily about a future ledger. It is the reward of a settled heart, working in secret, knowing it is not unseen. It is the freedom of not needing the room to weigh you correctly because ‘someone else’ already has.
I write this a few days on from the procedure. The dust has not settled. The body is still tired in the places nobody sees. But I am beginning to put words to what carried me through — and it was this. The quiet, undramatic conviction that the Father was beside me in every hour of it. That my work, my hidden carrying, my wife’s lifetime of unproclaimed giving, my parents’ door opening yet again without being asked, even the timing of the surgery itself — all of it was of a piece, and all of it was seen.
He is my Father. He sees in secret.
That is enough.
(Today’s OXYGEN by Gerard Francis)
Prayer: Lord, give me a heart that wants to keep learning, kept humble and yearns to learn to live like You.
Thanksgiving: We give thanks for the messages you deliver to us to guide us along our way.
OXYGEN 
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