Whatever You Do, As Unto the Lord

It was 3 a.m. on the line, the fourth night shift in a row, and I was running the same bolt into the same hole for the six hundredth time that night, thinking about how nobody would ever know or care whether I did it well or badly, so long as it passed inspection. The radio was playing something forgettable. My back hurt in the specific way it hurts after year six of this job. I remember wondering, not for the first time, whether this was what my life had come down to, whether there was any difference between doing the work carefully and doing it carelessly, since either way the truck rolled off the line and someone drove away in it without a thought for my hands.

A guy I trained under, years ago now, used to say a line from Colossians when the shift dragged, something about doing your work as if for the Lord and not for men, and I confess I used to hear it as the kind of thing bosses like to quote to get more out of you for free. I don't hear it that way anymore, though I'm not entirely sure when that changed. What strikes me now is that Paul wrote those words to people doing work with almost no dignity attached to it at all, work done under someone else's total control, and he still told them their labor had an audience worth caring about. I don't think that erases the tedium. I still hate the fourth night shift. But it means the bolt matters somewhere I can't see, to someone who isn't grading me on output.

Some nights that's a comfort and some nights it just sounds like a nice thing to tell tired people. I clocked out this morning still not sure which one it was. But I drove home anyway, and I'll go back tonight.