Not the Waiting Room

Twenty past five in the morning and the roller door goes up, and the cold that comes in off the yard is a specific cold that only exists in that ten seconds.

He has done this for nine years. He knows the sound the pallet truck makes when a wheel is going. He knows which driver will be late and be cheerful about it, and which one will be on time and say nothing at all. He knows how to get shrink wrap off in one piece, which nobody has ever thanked him for, and which is a genuine skill.

At half past seven the tea goes on. That is the good part of the morning and it lasts four minutes.

Somebody at church had asked him, kindly, over a biscuit, what he does for the Lord.

He had said, "Not much, really." He said it lightly, and laughed, and moved the conversation on, and thought about it the entire drive home and then most of that night.

Because there is a version of his week he can see clearly. Wednesday evening, when he stacks the chairs. Sunday, obviously. The half hour he spends most weeks on the phone to a man whose wife left, which he would never call anything.

And then there are the forty five hours on the bay, which he had, without ever deciding to, filed under the time between.

Nine years of dawns. Filed under nothing.

The eight hours are not the gap

There is a line in a letter to a small church in a town called Colossae, and it was written to a room that included people who did not own their own hours at all.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Master and not for men, knowing that from the Master you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Master, the Anointed One.Colossians 3:23 and 24

So hear this said over you, at the end of the eight hours. You are placed, and the shift is not the gap between the parts of your life that count, because Scripture puts the reward on the work itself and not on the room it is done in. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary hour a place where a person is genuinely with God.

Look at the last four words of it. You are serving. Present tense, no conditions attached, no list of qualifying occupations, no clause about whether the work is meaningful or the manager deserves it. Whatever you do. And then, so nobody could miss it, the sentence names who is actually being served, and it is not the company.

That is what a man named Luther went back to, five hundred years ago, and it was the piece that got people's attention almost as much as the arguing did. The word for a calling had come to belong to a small number of people in particular clothes. He put it back where the letter had it: on the shoemaker, on the farm worker, on the woman with a house full of children and no time to pray properly. Not as a consolation prize. As the actual thing.

So here is what that does to your week, and it is not a trick of perspective.

It does not mean the loading bay is secretly beautiful. Let that be said plainly, because a page that romanticises work you are actually tired of has lost you and deserves to. Some work is dull. Some is cold. Some of it is badly paid and will still be badly paid tomorrow, and calling it a ministry does not warm the yard up by a single degree.

What the letter says is not that the work is lovely. It says the work is counted. Those are different claims, and only one of them is true, and it happens to be the one you need.

And nothing in it ranks the trades. There is no order of merit here, no better and worse rung, no suggestion that you should be doing something else, or something more visible, or something with a stage attached. The word whatever was chosen carefully. It is the flattest, widest word in the sentence and it covers your entire nine years.