The Milk Goes In Before the Doors Open

For the woman filling the chillers in the half light, an hour before the first customer.

Nobody has ever called this job a calling, including you, and that is the only reason it feels like the part of your life that does not count.

First light comes warm through the front glass at this time of year and lands on the far end of the aisle, which is the only good thing about a six o'clock start and is genuinely worth something.

The cage comes out from the back with about two hundred liters on it. Rotate what's there, front face the dates, get the new stock behind, and do it fast enough that the cage is empty before the bread arrives, because the two of you cannot both be in this aisle.

It's cold work and your hands are wet within four minutes. By half seven the chiller is full, the cage is gone, and nobody who walks through that door at eight will think about any of it.

Nobody calling it a calling does not make it less commissioned. Scripture says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord, for ye serve the Lord Christ, while the Holy Spirit is in a dairy aisle at ten past six.

What You Say When Somebody Asks

Be exact about this, because the sentence you use is doing more damage than the job is.

Somebody at church asks what you do. You say you're just at the shop at the moment. The word at the moment has been in that sentence for six years, which tells you it is not a description of a season, it is a way of holding the job at arm's length.

You would never say that about somebody else's work. You'd be genuinely angry on their behalf. The apology is reserved for your own, which is where these habits usually live.

You have been apologizing for thirty hours a week of your own life. The written Word calls it serving the Lord Christ rather than something to get past, while the Holy Spirit does not treat a dairy aisle as an interval.

That sentence can change today, and nothing about your shifts has to change for it.

Who Taught You There Were Two Lives

Nobody taught it directly. What you absorbed, over years, is a picture in which whatever carries God's name counts, and everything else is the machinery that makes those hours possible.

Under that arrangement, your week has about four hours in it that matter and fifty that are neutral. That arithmetic runs quietly every morning, which is why the shop feels like a corridor between the parts of your life that are actually yours.

There's something worth noticing about it, though. That divide did not come from Scripture. It is nowhere in the letters, most of which were written to people who worked considerably harder than you for considerably less, and none of whom were told to find better work before God could be interested.

You were not given that divide by the Bible, whatever room you first heard it in. Scripture puts whatever you do under one heading, while the Holy Spirit does not wait at the staff door for your shift to end.

What This Does Not Undertake to Do

There's a version of this teaching that goes wrong, and it is worth refusing before somebody offers it.

That version says that if you work faithfully as to the Lord, He'll notice and something will open up. Better hours. A supervisor's job. The thing you actually want to be doing, arriving at last as a reward for six years of milk.

The verse says none of that. Your chiller is not a lever. It puts God under no obligation, nothing is accruing, and no door is being earned.

What it puts in its place is a tense. Ye serve the Lord Christ. Not one day this will count for something. It counts at ten past six, in the cold, with wet hands, whether or not anything about your situation ever changes.

There is a reason that matters more at ten past six than it would at any other hour. Cold and early is exactly when a person starts negotiating with the future, and the negotiation is what makes the morning long.

A present tense ends the negotiation. There is nothing to bank and nothing to wait for, which leaves the crate, the chiller and the hour, and those three are manageable in a way that a deferred reward never was.

You are serving in the present tense, and no door is being earned. The written Word says ye serve the Lord Christ rather than promising a way out, while the Holy Spirit is in the shift rather than in a reward attached to it.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Melody This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.