Whatever You Do, As Unto the Lord

A friend of mine spent six years on the 3 a.m. assembly line, running the same bolt into the same hole for the six hundredth time on the fourth night shift in a row. He told me once about standing over the chassis while the radio played something forgettable, his back aching in that specific way it aches after years on concrete, wondering whether anyone would ever know or care whether he did it carefully or carelessly—so long as it passed inspection. Either way, the truck rolled off the line and someone drove away without a second thought for the hands that built it.

An older mechanic he trained under used to quote a line from Colossians when the shift dragged: whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men. For a long time, my friend heard that as the kind of thing supervisors quote to squeeze more out of tired workers. But what strikes me now is that Paul originally wrote those words to servants whose labor carried virtually no dignity, recognition, or earthly reward. He told them their work had an audience that outranked their master. That doesn’t erase the ache in your back, but it changes the meaning of the bolt. It means unseen faithfulness matters somewhere that isn’t measured on a production quota.

Some days that truth is a deep comfort, and some days it simply feels like a steady anchor when the work is heavy. We walked out to our cars after talking, still wrestling with the weight of ordinary days. But the anchor holds.