I was the last car in the church parking lot again, the one who stays to stack chairs and lock the side door, and as I pulled out onto the empty street I caught myself doing the math I try not to do, counting how many people had actually shown up to the thing I'd spent three weeks organizing. Six. Six people, after all those emails and all that praying over the sign-up sheet, and I sat at the red light replaying every reason I could have skipped it myself, wondering if anyone would have noticed either way. It wasn't dramatic, this feeling. It was just tired and small and quiet, the kind of discouragement that doesn't announce itself so much as settle into the seat beside you.

I've been sitting with the story of Elijah again lately, not the fire on Carmel but the part right after, when he tells God he alone is left, he alone has kept faith while everyone else has abandoned it, and God's answer isn't comfort exactly, it's correction: there are seven thousand others who have not bowed the knee, and Elijah simply didn't know it. What gets me about that passage is how sincerely wrong Elijah was. He wasn't lying or exaggerating for effect. He genuinely could not see the faithfulness happening around him, because faithfulness so rarely announces itself, and because exhaustion narrows the eyes until all you can count is your own effort and your own apparent failure. I recognize that narrowing. I was doing it at a red light over six folding chairs.

I don't think the seven thousand made Elijah's loneliness disappear the moment he heard the number. He still had a wilderness ahead of him, still had work to do that nobody would applaud. What changed was smaller than relief. It was just the knowledge that his isolation had been a trick of his own vision rather than the truth of his circumstance, and I find I have to relearn that same lesson on a fairly regular basis, usually while driving home from something that felt like it mattered to no one but me.

I don't know who else stayed late somewhere tonight, unseen, unthanked. But I suspect I'm not counting right either.