Nehemiah 12:1-7: in context

This is a list of the priests and Levites who came back from exile in the first wave, with Zerubbabel and Jeshua: Seraiah, Jeremiah, Ezra, Amariah, and a couple dozen more names, the chiefs of the priests in their day. It is easy to skim, one more roster of hard-to-pronounce names. But it helps to know where it sits. Nehemiah 12 goes on, many verses later, to describe a magnificent celebration, the joyful dedication of the rebuilt walls of Jerusalem, with two great choirs and music and thanksgiving heard far away. This opening list is of the generation that came back first, long before that celebration, to the rubble.

These are the ones who laid the foundation. They returned to a ruined city and a collapsed worship and began the slow, unglamorous work of restarting the priesthood and rebuilding from nothing, and most of them did not live to see the great dedication day. They did the groundwork; a later generation got the celebration. Their names are preserved here not for any single dramatic deed but simply because they were the ones who showed up first and did the founding labor that everything after was built upon. They were content, whether they knew it or not, to be the foundation that others would one day stand on to rejoice.

That asks something of me, because the work God gives is often exactly this kind. Much of what matters is foundational, the unseen groundwork whose fruit and celebration belong to a later day and to other people, and I would usually rather do the visible thing that gets the applause than the founding labor no one throws a party for. These priests came back to the rubble and began. Am I willing to do the foundational, unglamorous work whose harvest others will enjoy after me, content to be a name in the founding roster rather than a face at the celebration?