For the volunteer who redoes the same eleven cards every intake and has never once been asked about it.
How many times have you replaced card number four?
You'd know, roughly. It's the one about what to do if somebody arrives without paperwork, which means it's the one that gets handled most. It goes soft at the corner first, then it delaminates along the top edge where the seal is weakest.
You're in at ten past seven to get the machine warm. Eleven cards, trimmed with about two millimeters of margin, because a wider margin curls and a narrower one lets water in. You worked that out by trial over two years and nobody asked you to.
By eight they're in the rack by the door and the morning shift comes in and picks them up without looking, which is exactly the point of doing them properly.
Work designed to be invisible is not work that goes unseen by God. Scripture says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not unto men, while the Holy Spirit is beside a warm laminator at ten past seven.
The Particular Bind of Doing It Well
Be exact about it, because this is a specific difficulty and it deserves better than the usual encouragement.
A card that works is a card nobody notices. Somebody picks it up, reads it, and gets on with the intake, and the whole experience is of not having a problem. That is what you have been producing for two years.
A card that fails is a different matter entirely. It curls, somebody swears, somebody says these cards are useless, and for about four minutes the cards are the most discussed object in that building.
So the better you are at this, the less anybody can tell you're doing it, and the only way to be noticed is to be bad at it.
Competence in this job guarantees invisibility, which is a strange bind to live inside. The written Word aims the work at the Lord rather than at men, while the Holy Spirit sees a two millimeter margin nobody will ever measure.
What You Have Been Quietly Expecting
There's an account running underneath the early starts, and it has never been written down anywhere.
It goes roughly like this. Nobody sees, therefore God sees, therefore something is owed. Not by the organization. By Him. You'd deny that if it were put to you and you'd be sincere in denying it.
Then a hard stretch comes, and you catch yourself doing arithmetic. Two years of ten past seven in one column, the hard stretch in the other, and the sum comes out feeling like a breach of something you never signed.
You have been keeping an account, and God never agreed to those terms. Scripture gives your work a direction rather than a price, while the Holy Spirit keeps a faithful woman from turning her own faithfulness into a lever.
That's the thing to set down this morning. Not the cards. The ledger.
What the Verse Gives Instead
Read the sentence again and notice what it does not contain, because the absence is where the freedom is.
Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. There's a direction in it. There's no bargain. It tells you which way the work faces and then it stops.
It does not say that a woman who laminates faithfully gets an easier month. It does not say God owes anything to somebody with a trimmer at ten past seven. Every one of those is an addition somebody made later, and every one of them turns a card into a deposit.
What it gives instead is the present tense. This morning is received this morning, complete, with nothing pending and nothing accruing.
Each morning is finished on the morning, and nothing is sitting in a ledger. The written Word points the labor at the Lord and names no return, while the Holy Spirit receives an hour at the hour it is given.
As to the Lord, Not to the Rota
One short verse settles what all the quiet expecting has been about, and it settles it by naming a direction rather than a reward.
Heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. The work is pointed somewhere. A rota is not the somewhere, and a rota was never in a position to receive it in the first place.
There's a short line in Colossians about the direction of ordinary work, and its second half answers the bind you're in.
> And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men; > Colossians 3:23 (KJV)
Not unto men. That clause removes your problem rather than compensating for it.
If the work were unto men, invisibility would be a defect. It would mean two years of early starts went nowhere, which is precisely what the account has been trying to fix by promising something later. Not unto men means nothing was ever lost in the first place.
Read it that way and the rack by the door stops being the sad part of the job. A morning shift that picks up a card without looking is the plainest possible picture of work aimed somewhere other than at the people who might have noticed.
Invisibility is not a problem for work aimed at the Lord. The written Word says not unto men, while the Holy Spirit is the One present in a workroom at ten past seven.
There's a second freedom in that clause and it's worth taking this morning. If the work isn't unto men, then men can't damage it either. A shift that picks the cards up without a word hasn't withheld anything from you, because they were never the ones it was aimed at.
That's not indifference to the people in that building. You still want card four to hold up on a busy intake, and you still trim to two millimeters. It's that the weight of the morning doesn't rest on whether anybody looks up, which is exactly why you can keep doing it in a week when nobody does.
It is worth being exact about the direction of the work, because the whole difficulty has been a direction rather than a quantity. Nobody in that building is under-appreciating you by very much. They simply do not see it, because it happens before they arrive.
Aimed at the Lord, invisibility stops being a shortfall and becomes an ordinary condition of the job, like the smell of the machine and the trimmer being slightly blunt.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Speak these as a man already spoken for, out of a claim God made rather than one he applied for. What the cards are used for, and who is ever told who made them, stays with God.
My hands are His, and this table is His, and the half hour before the shift is not a holding pattern. The written Word of God says whatsoever I do, I am to do heartily as to the Lord and not to men, which aims the work past every rota in the building. I put down the expecting I never admitted to. The Holy Spirit is at this laminator before the morning shift, out ahead of me. This morning's cards are not separate from Him. No account is running in my favor, and I am not operating anything. My palms are up, and every card that goes out is God's.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Colossians 3:23
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
