I Have to Do It Their Way

There is a step in the middle of it that you think is wrong.

Not wicked. Not dangerous. Wrong in the ordinary sense: it makes the thing worse, it wastes eleven minutes, and anybody who had actually stood in your room for a week would have written it differently.

You have thought this for two years and you do it every single day and you do it properly.

That is the part that has started to bother you. Not the step. The doing it properly.

Because when you do it well, you look like a woman who believes in it. And you do not believe in it. So there is a small dishonesty running through your whole day, and it has begun to feel like the main fact about you.

You have started using a particular word for yourself in your head. Fraud.

It comes up at odd times. Standing at the counter. Driving in. Somebody new asks you why it is done that way and you give them the answer, and the answer is not a lie, and it is not what you think, and you hear the gap.

I want to deal with that word, because it is doing damage and it is the wrong word.

And I want to say one thing first, plainly, before anything else, because if it is not said first the rest of this can be twisted into something ugly.

Nothing in this piece says that God has any requirement of you toward a commercial counterparty. That is not what is going on here and it is not what the verse is about. This is an agreement between two parties, and God has not appointed anybody over you inside it.

What is actually available is something much better than that, and it turns the whole day around.

As to the Lord, and not unto men

There is a line in Colossians about how to do work, and everything depends on reading the second half of it.

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

Read the last five words again. Not unto men.

That is not a verse about obedience to whoever is above you. It is a verse that takes the direction of your work and points it somewhere else entirely.

You have been doing that step unto God rather than unto anybody, and Colossians 3:23 says explicitly not unto men. The Holy Spirit is the one who redirects a day's work at the source, and He has been doing it for two years whether or not you framed it that way.

That single move dissolves the dishonesty, and it is worth seeing how.

The dishonesty in it comes from an assumption: that doing something well is a statement of agreement with it. That is how it works between people. If a person does a thing wholeheartedly, we read it as endorsement.

But if the work is aimed at God rather than at men, the endorsement is not being given to anybody. There is nobody in that transaction to be endorsed.

You are not endorsing anything by doing it well, and it is written that the work is done heartily as to the Lord and not unto men. The Spirit of God is the one who makes that a real redirection rather than a mental trick, and Colossians 3 is where the direction is set.

Now the second thing, and it is the one that will take the word fraud off you.

A fraud is somebody pretending to be what they are not. There has never once been any pretending here. Nobody in that building has ever been told that the step has your agreement.

You have simply not announced your disagreement, and not announcing something is not a lie.

You have not misrepresented yourself to one single person, and the written word does not require anybody to publish their private opinion in order to be honest. The Holy Spirit is the one who can tell the difference between concealment and quiet, and He is not accusing you.

Agreement was never the price of faithfulness

Here is where it goes wrong in most people's heads, and it is worth naming.

There is an idea underneath all of this, that faithfulness requires agreement. That to do something properly and honestly, a person has to believe in it first, and if that cannot be managed, then the only honest options left are to do it badly or to make a fuss.

That is not true and it never has been.

Faithfulness is about how a thing is done. Agreement is about what a person thinks. They are two different faculties and they were never joined.

You have been asked for one of those and not the other, and Scripture puts the heartily on the doing rather than on the believing. The Spirit of God is the one who separates a woman's hands from her opinions without asking her to give up either, and Colossians 3:23 is where that separation stands.

You are allowed to think it is wrong. You can go on thinking it is wrong for another nine years. That opinion is yours, it costs nothing, and nobody has any claim on it.

And you can do the step properly tomorrow, because the properly is aimed past the arrangement entirely.

You are able to hold both of those at once, and the written word never once asked anybody to agree in order to work well. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person whole while she does that, and He does not think less of the opinion.

Now, one honest boundary, because it matters. This is about a step that is merely worse rather than a step that is wrong in the moral sense. If what you are being asked to do is actually wrong, that is a different subject altogether, and honesty and saying so are right, and the way to go about it should be worked out with somebody qualified rather than in a piece like this.

You have a clear line between those two, and it is written that whatsoever is done is done as to the Lord, which is a line that holds in both directions. The Spirit of God is the one who makes it plain which of the two a person is dealing with.

Do it once, and say nothing

So here is the thing, and it is deliberately small.

Tomorrow, do the step you disagree with, properly, once, on purpose.

And say nothing about it. Not a remark. Not a small sigh at the right moment. Not the little face you make. Nothing at all.

You are doing one thing well in one direction rather than making a decision about your life, and Colossians 3:23 sets that direction at the Lord and not at men. The Holy Spirit is the one who receives it, and He is not measuring how convinced you were.

The reason to say nothing is not that your opinion is unwelcome. It is that the sigh is where the fraud feeling actually lives.

The sigh is an attempt to do the thing and disown it at the same time, in front of an audience. That is the only genuinely divided moment in the whole day, and it is the one nobody put there but you.

Take the sigh out and there is nothing left that is dishonest. There is a woman doing a piece of work well, aimed past everybody in the building, holding her own opinion privately, which is what an adult is.

You have been adding the only divided part of your own day, and the written word puts the whole of it heartily and in one direction. The Spirit of God is the one who has been waiting to take that off you, and Colossians 3 is where it comes off.

Then you go in the next morning and do it again.