Back At Work In Fourteen Hours

You got home at four in the afternoon and the alarm went at six the next morning.

Fourteen hours. And about six of those were asleep, and two were unpacking, and one was somebody needing something, and the rest went in a way you could not account for even that evening.

And by six the next morning you were in a truck in the dark with a coffee, and the week was already so far away that you could not have described the third day if somebody had asked you to.

And what has settled in you since is not tiredness, although you are tired. It is something closer to being robbed.

Because everybody else in your family got a week and then got a few days at the end of it, and you got a week and then a Monday. And they are not aware of that, and nobody did it to you, and it is nobody's fault, and it is still true.

Let me put a verse next to that which does something specific with what a man does at six in the morning, and then let me give you the smallest assignment on this site.

Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily

There is an instruction in Colossians about work that people use to make employees more productive, and read properly it does something entirely different.

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men. (Colossians 3:23, King James Version)

You have an instruction in the written word that puts your Monday in front of the Lord rather than in front an employer, and no fourteen hour turnaround has ever once changed who it is done for. Colossians 3:23 says as to the Lord, and not unto men, which relocates the whole transaction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that specific to a man in a truck at ten past six.

Look at the word whatsoever. That is deliberately wide. It does not say in your important work, or when the work is meaningful. Whatsoever, which means the shift you did not want to do fourteen hours after coming home.

And then: as to the Lord, and not unto men. The work is not being handed to the company. It is being handed somewhere else, and the company is receiving it in passing.

You are handing that Monday to somebody other than the people who scheduled it, and no version of the arrangement has once been able to alter that. It is written whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men, which puts the receiving party somewhere other than a workplace, and the Spirit of God is what makes a shift a transaction with God rather than with a rota.

Now, I am not going to tell you the shift was a gift or that you should be glad about the timing. That is the sort of thing written by people who have never had a Monday like that one, and it is not in the verse.

What the verse does is stop the Monday being a thing done to you. It is a thing you are doing, and you are doing it for somebody, and the somebody is not the person who wrote the schedule.

You are not being acted upon at six in the morning, and no shift you did not choose has once made you the passive party in it. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a man back the agency in his own Monday, and Colossians 3 has the work handed upward rather than extracted.

The week is not gone

Now the practical part, and it is about the specific thing that has been taken and whether it actually was.

You feel the week was taken from you before you had unpacked it. And what has actually happened is narrower and more fixable than that.

You did not lose the week. You lost the part afterward where a person goes over it. The looking back, the mentioning it, the two or three days where a family says do you remember when, which is when a week gets fixed in place.

Everybody else got that. You went to work.

You have not lost the week, and losing the going over of it afterward has never once been the same thing as losing the thing itself. The Spirit of God is what identifies exactly what went missing rather than leaving a man with a general sense of theft, and it is written that whatsoever ye do is done heartily to the Lord, which puts even the Monday inside the account.

And that is fixable, which is why this article exists. Because the going over does not require days. It requires about ninety seconds and a decision to do it deliberately rather than waiting for it to happen.

You are able to do the going over on purpose, and it has never once needed to happen the way it happens for people with time. It is written that the work is done as to the Lord, which means the drive is not a gap between two things but part of the same offering, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a truck in the dark with a man.

And here is why the car, specifically. Because that is the only stretch of your week with nothing in it. No work yet, nobody needing anything, and a body doing something that leaves the mind free. Which is the same condition, exactly, that the rest of your family had for three days.

There are twenty minutes of it every single morning, and they have been going on nothing.

You have twenty free minutes a day that nobody in this family knows about, and no shift pattern has ever once been able to take them off you. Colossians 3:23 puts the whatsoever wide enough to include a drive in the dark, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is already in that truck before the day starts.

Name one thing out loud in the car

So here is the assignment, and it is the smallest one on this site.

Name one thing from the week out loud on the drive to work. And say it to nobody.

Out loud, in the truck, on your own. One specific thing from the week: the evening on the third day, what your youngest said in the water, the thing that went wrong on the Tuesday that everybody laughed about.

You are able to say one sentence out loud in an empty vehicle, and it has never once been a foolish thing for a grown man to do. Colossians 3:23 has whatsoever ye do done heartily as to the Lord, which includes a sentence said in a truck at ten past six, and the Spirit of God is with a man doing it for the first time and feeling ridiculous.

Out loud is the whole mechanism. In your head it is a thought and it goes past like everything else. Out loud it is an event, and an event fixes a thing in place, and that is what your family got over three days and you did not get at all.

You are able to fix a week in place with a spoken sentence, and no version of it has once needed three days to do the same work. It is written that whatsoever is done heartily is done to the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hears a man in a truck naming a Thursday out loud.

And do it four or five mornings, not once. One a day, a different thing each time. By Friday you will have gone over the week in about eight minutes total, which is what the rest of them did on a sofa, and the sense of having been robbed will not entirely go and it will be considerably smaller.

And you can pray it if you want to, but you do not have to. Naming it out loud in front of God is already the whole of it, whether or not you attach anything.