Ordinary Work, Seen by God

Paul wrote "whatever you do" to people whose work nobody thanked

Most of the work that keeps a life running is done where no one is watching.

The dishes, the laundry, the shift that ends at eleven, the spreadsheet nobody will read, the diaper, the drive to practice, the same four rooms vacuumed again on Saturday. It's tempting to think God is mostly interested in the other part of your life, the part with a microphone or a mission trip or a dramatic answer to prayer, and that everything else is just what you do between the moments that count.

There's a verse that seems to make it worse.

"Whatever You Do, Do It Heartily"

And whatever you do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not to men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance; for you serve the Lord Christ. (Colossians 3:23-24)

Read it at 10:40 at night with a basket of wet clothes and it can sound like one more thing you're failing at. Heartily? You're not doing anything heartily right now. You're doing it because the kids need socks tomorrow. Now it seems God wants enthusiasm on top of the clean socks, and you don't have any left to give.

But look at who Paul is talking to. The verse right before it starts, Bondservants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh (Colossians 3:22). Paul wrote "whatever you do" to people whose work was assigned to them, unpaid, and almost never thanked. If anyone had reason to believe their daily grind was invisible to God, it was them. And Paul tells them the Lord sees it, and that they're serving Christ while they do it.

Then notice what he promises. The reward of the inheritance. Wages are what a worker earns. An inheritance is what a child receives because of whose child he is. Paul looks at people with no legal standing, no property, and no say over their own hours, and calls them heirs. The work doesn't purchase the inheritance. The inheritance is already theirs in Christ, and it turns their ordinary work into something done for Someone who loves them.

In college I did my laundry at a place across the street from my dorm called the Mouse Trap, and I found out why they called it that. I spent as few coins as possible to wash as many clothes as possible. Years later, with a good engineering job, a coworker told me I was still living like a college student, ordering the cheapest thing on every menu. A lot of believers do their daily work that way, rationing, as if the account were nearly empty, when they've been made heirs.

I preached on this once and put it in a phrase I still like. The question isn't "what's in this for me," it's "what's in me for this." Whatever you do flows out of what God put in you, and you show up at work, or at the washing machine, as someone who's been given grace to do it in the first place.

The Book of Brandon

Years ago I asked our church to imagine someone in the year 3019 mining old emails and finding one from Abbe to me. It became so popular that people turned it into a book, with chapters and verses.

Chapter one says, You looked really amazing this morning. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me. I'll miss you more than you know over the next two weeks. Chapter two says, Please make sure you feed the cats. The kids will need their laundry done. The dishes in the dishwasher are clean, so you'll want to put those away.

Now imagine a church that only preaches chapter two. Three points on hungry cats. A sermon series on laundry. If you skip chapter one, you end up with a religion built around chores. But if you read chapter one first, chapter two makes perfect sense. Chapter two gets done because of chapter one, and nobody in our house is confused about which comes first.

That's the order Paul keeps in Colossians. The chapter before the laundry list says you're complete in Him (Colossians 2:10), and your life is hidden with Christ in God (Colossians 3:3). The ordinary work comes after the identity, and it rests on it.

The Carpenter

There's one more thing worth sitting with. Jesus began His public ministry when He was about thirty (Luke 3:23). Before that, the people of Nazareth knew Him as a tradesman. Is this not the carpenter? they asked (Mark 6:3). The Son of God spent most of His years on earth doing work that nobody wrote down: measuring, sawing, fixing a neighbor's table, sweeping up shavings at the end of the day.

Those years weren't a waiting room before the real thing. They were part of the life He lived for you, and they tell you something about the hours you're living right now.

Some nights you'll fold the last shirt with nothing in you but tired, and that's fine. You don't need to feel holy at the dryer for it to count. You're serving the Lord Christ, and He is the One who sees.

She pulls the last load out warm, sets the basket on the folding table, and smooths a small shirt flat with both hands while the machines around her keep turning.