As To The Lord And Not Unto Men

Two in the morning, in the rain, and nobody will ever know.

He got the call at half past midnight because he is the one they ring. He drove out. He found it, which took an hour and a half of being wrong before he was right. He fixed it. He drove home at four and slept for two hours and did a normal day.

And here is the thing about that night: because he fixed it, nothing happened.

Nobody noticed a problem. There was no problem, by the time anybody was awake. And that means the entire event, from the call to the drive home, exists nowhere except in his own head, and there is nothing about it that could ever be told to anybody without sounding like a man asking to be admired.

He does not want to be admired. He wants something else and he cannot name it.

He said it once, badly, standing by the van. He said: I do not want a medal. I just do not know what to do with it.

That is the thing. A whole night, with real skill in it and real cost, and nowhere for it to go. It does not fit into a conversation. It does not go on a list. It sits in him, unfiled.

You may have your own two in the morning. Something you did well that produced no evidence at all, and no way to put it anywhere.

Where the work goes

Here is a verse people quote as motivation, and I want you to read it as directions.

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

As to the Lord.

That is a direction of travel. It says where the work goes. Not where it comes from, not what it is worth, where it goes: toward Him.

And then, and not unto men. Which is not saying that people do not benefit, because obviously they do. It is saying that the destination of the work is not the people who benefit from it.

That is your answer, and it is a strange one, and it takes a minute to feel.

You have been treating your night as something that has nowhere to go, because the only destinations you can see are people, and no person received it in any way they will ever know about. But Scripture says the work does not travel to people. It travels to Him. That was true of the night at two in the morning exactly as much as it was true of the ordinary Thursday.

You are doing work that travels to God rather than to the people who benefit from it. Colossians 3:23 sets the direction as to the Lord and not unto men, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a night nobody will ever hear about and files it where it was always going.

Now let me stay with the specific thing you could not name, because I think I know what it is.

It is not admiration and it is not thanks. It is that a thing that costs something wants to be received by somebody. Not praised. Received, the way a gift is received: taken by a person who knows what is in it.

That is not vanity. That is what it means to be a person who does things.

You are received in the work rather than merely observed doing it. The written word makes the Lord the destination and not the audience, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what you did at two in the morning and lets it arrive somewhere.

The honest half. Nobody is going to be told. It would not translate and you were right about that: any telling of it would sound like a man fishing, and you would hate it, and you would be right to.

There is a part only you can do, and it exists precisely because there is nowhere else for this to go. You say it out loud, once, plainly, and you say who it went to. That is not filing it away. That is delivering it.