The One Beyond the Payroll

Matthew 18:10–14

Tonight I sat with the staff roster in one hand and a list of names in the other. The roster is short. The list is not.

I know these boys. Some sat across from me in the Bible study room at Changi, Bibles open, eyes guarded. Some wore the TCE apron and have since moved on. Some are due out soon and have already asked, quietly, whether there is a place for them. And I have done the arithmetic every social enterprise founder dreads: wages, CPF, rent, beans, milk. The budget carries only so many. The rest I watch walk back into the hills.

I will be honest. It grieves me. Some nights it feels like failure, the same ache I carried when we left The Star Vista, the sense that my hands are simply too small for the work.

Then Jesus asks, "How think ye?" The shepherd in His story counts. He knows the number. He notices the gap. Heaven is not careless with names.

But here is what I keep forgetting: I am not the Shepherd. I am a sheep who once wandered very far, the boy who thought he ruled the world. God came into the mountains for me through a Bible study and a pastor who refused to give up. That search never depended on anyone's budget. It does not depend on mine now.

Verse 14 settles it: "Even so it is not the will of your Father which is in heaven, that one of these little ones should perish." Not my payroll's will. His. He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and He has more ways to reach a lost boy than a job at TCE. A phone call. A meal. A visit. A referral to a halfway house. A church that opens its doors. An Academy that may train far more than our cafés could ever employ.

So tonight I stopped staring at the limit and started writing names, one by one. This week I will pray for each of them by name and ask the Lord for the next step for each. Not the whole road, only the next step.

The ninety-nine are not forgotten. The one is not abandoned. And I am not searching alone.