There are some jobs that perpetually exist. To such work there is no end. No sooner than you hoover the house, do the dishes, wash the clothes a new pile of dirt, set of crockery and basket of washing appears. The work never ends, the pile never depletes, it can never be said that it is done.

Some work in the church is like this. There is no end to the preaching to be done. There is no time we can say we have completed the full amount of prayer. No amount of evangelism is ever enough. These are tasks which have no end and are never complete. There is always more to do and no sooner as you have done any the cycle needs must begin again.

But just because a task is not done or completed doesn’t mean it has no value. The work of washing clothes – though dirty clothes immediately appear in the pile again – doesn’t change the fact that these clothes, for a time, are clean and wearable. The hoovering of the carpet that gets dirty as soon as people walk on it again doesn’t change the fact that it is clean at the moment and cleaner than it would be if you left it. The washing of the dishes makes these dishes clean for now and usable at the moment.

The same is true of the never ending tasks in church. The preaching may not be done – there is always another sermon to preach – but that doesn’t stop this sermon from being useful and helpful in building up God’s people right now. The work of evangelism may not finish (at least in our lifetime) but that doesn’t stop these people from having heard the gospel and engaged on some level with Jesus. The incomplete nature of the task doesn’t make the task valueless or pointless at the time.

It can feel Sisyphean to keep doing the same thing over and over without end. But the Sisyphean task was a pointless one – rolling a rock up a hill from which it will fall repeatedly. There is no value in the pushing of the rock. The difference with the never ending housework or the continual church work is these things are not pointless in and of themselves. They may, like Sisyphus’ task, never end. But unlike Sisyphus rolling his rock up hill, there is purpose and value to that task as it is being done. It is not a punishment to be endured and it is not valueless work that we are fated to do. It may never be complete, but it is nevertheless valuable.

The work of ministry can easily feel like a treadmill. It can feel like we are doing the same thing over and over again. To some degree, that is true. We have certain tasks to do that never end and they must be done on repeat. But that doesn’t make the work pointless or the effort valueless. We shouldn’t mistake repetitive and unending with valueless and pointless. These aren’t the same thing and when we understand it, we are more likely to press on in the never-ending task we have been given to do for now.