The Line Down The Middle Of The Week

There is a line in Sarah's week and she drew it herself when she was twenty two and she has never once looked at it since.

On one side: Sunday morning. The midweek thing she gets to about twice a month. The twenty minutes with the Bible on a good day and the ninety seconds on a bad one. Praying in the car. The message she sent a friend who is going through something.

On the other side: everything else. Forty three hours of it this week, plus the thinking about it in the shower, plus the two hours on Saturday she does not tell anybody about.

She would never say that God is not interested in the second side. If you asked her directly she would say of course He is, He is interested in all of it, and she would mean it, and she would be a little uncomfortable about being asked.

But look at where she puts herself.

Every Sunday she walks into a room feeling like a person arriving from somewhere else. Like she has been away all week doing something unrelated and has come back in to the real thing for ninety minutes. And on Sunday night, driving home, there is a small drop, and she has never named it, and it is this: back to the other side.

Twenty two to thirty six. Fourteen years of arriving and leaving.

I would guess you have a line too. Ask yourself which side of it you spend the overwhelming majority of your life on, and then ask yourself which side you privately believe counts, and notice what that has been doing to you every week for years.

There is no line in the sentence

Here is a verse people quote at work and almost nobody reads properly.

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

It gets used as a motivational line about effort. Work hard, because God is watching. That is not what it says.

Read the first two words. Whatsoever ye do. That is not a category. That is everything, with nothing carved off. And then read who the work is being done to: as to the Lord. Not for Him in the sense of on His behalf later. To Him. The work is going somewhere and the somewhere is God.

And notice who Paul was writing that to. He was writing to servants. People whose hours were not their own, who could not choose their tasks, who had none of the standing you would need to make their work sound meaningful. He tells them the thing they are doing all day is going to the Lord.

You are doing work that goes to Him, and it has been going to Him during the hours you had written off. Colossians 3:23 says whatsoever ye do, done as to the Lord, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word whatsoever seriously in a life that has been sorting itself into two piles for fourteen years.

Here is what the line has actually cost you, and it is worth being precise about it.

The line did not make Sunday better. It made the other side of the week godless in your own mind, which is a strange and heavy thing to believe about the place where most of your life happens. You have spent fourteen years feeling like a visitor in the smaller room and an exile in the larger one.

You are not a visitor on Sunday and you were never an exile on Tuesday. The written word puts whatsoever inside the same sentence as the Lord, and the Holy Spirit does not clock off between the two.

Take the honest half. Some of your week genuinely is drudgery, and calling it worship does not make it enjoyable, and I am not asking you to feel differently about a difficult Thursday. Paul was not writing to people having a lovely time either. The point is not the feeling. The point is the direction the work travels.

And there is one thing here that only you can do. The line has to actually be rubbed out, and that happens by saying so, over the specific hours, out loud, in your own words. Not by deciding to feel more spiritual at work.