Do They Say Thank You

Bernadine cleans the fourth floor from five in the morning until nine.

She knows things about those forty-one people that they would be astonished by. She knows which one keeps a photograph in a drawer instead of on the desk. She knows which one has been eating nothing but the vending machine for a fortnight, and which one has a plant they are murdering slowly, and which one cries in the stairwell between five past eight and quarter past on a Thursday, because Bernadine does the stairs at ten to and has learned to do them earlier.

By half past eight the floor starts filling up.

And this is the part.

They walk past her. Around her, mostly. There is a small maneuver people do around a cleaning cart, a sort of half turn with the eyes going up and to the left, and Bernadine has been on the receiving end of that maneuver roughly forty thousand times.

She is not invisible. That is the wrong word, and she would tell you so. She is stepped around.

Her granddaughter Kemi, who is ten and has recently discovered injustice, asked her about it in the kitchen on a Saturday with flour on both of them.

"Nana. Do they say thank you?"

And Bernadine said, "No, baby."

Kemi put the spoon down. "Not even one?"

"There is a young man on the far end who says good morning. He has said it every day for about two years and I could not tell you his name."

"That is rude," said Kemi.

"It is rude," said Bernadine, because she was not going to lie to a ten year old about it and because it is rude.

And Kemi said, "So why do you do it properly, then? If nobody looks?"

And Bernadine opened her mouth to say because I am not doing it for them, which is what she has always said, and then she found she did not know how to finish the sentence.

She stood there with the flour on her hands.

Because if not for them, then for who, exactly? And she had never once had to say it out loud.

Now let me ask you.

You have a corridor. It might be a real one. It might be a house where the same work gets done every single day by you and is noticed by nobody, or a job where the only feedback loop that exists is the one that fires when something goes wrong.

And you have said the sentence too. I do not do it for them.

So finish it tonight.

The account you are actually serving

Paul is writing to people whose work situation was genuinely worse than yours, and he does not tell them their masters will improve. He redirects the whole transaction.

With good will render service, as to the Lord, and not to men, knowing that whatever good thing each one does, this he will receive back from the Lord.Ephesians 6:7 to 8

As to the Lord, and not to men. He is not describing an attitude adjustment. He is naming who is actually receiving the work, which is a fact and not a technique.

And then the thing he wants them to know, which is the second half: whatever good thing each one does, this he will receive back from the Lord. Whatever. Each one. No category of work excluded, no rank, no seniority, and no requirement that anybody on earth noticed.

So hear this over you, on the fourth floor at ten to nine. Your work is being received, every morning, by the One who does not miss anything, and the forty thousand half turns did not intercept a single one of them. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes a person able to work like that without becoming bitter, which is not something a person manages by grit.

Now let me say the part that most articles skip, because Kemi was right and she deserves an answer too.

It is rude.

Nothing in this message makes it not rude. Being stepped around forty thousand times is a real injury delivered in very small pieces, and if it has made you hard round the edges then that is a fair response to an unfair thing, and God is not disappointed in you for it.

Scripture does not ask you to pretend the corridor is kind. It relocates the account so that your work does not depend on the corridor being kind, which is a different thing entirely and a great deal more use to you at ten to nine.

Here is what the relocation actually does.

When your work is rendered to people, its value rises and falls with their attention. On a Tuesday when somebody notices, the whole shift means something. On a Wednesday when nobody does, four hours quietly become nothing. That is an unbearable way to live and you have been living it.

When it is rendered to the Lord, the value is fixed at the moment of the doing.

You do it properly at half past six, alone, in an empty office, and it is complete right there. Nothing that happens at half past eight can add to it or take anything from it. The Word says you will receive it back from the Lord, and the Spirit of God is the one who bears that in on a person until they can actually feel the difference between the two ways of working.

Let me guard one thing before we go on.

None of this is an argument for staying quiet about bad treatment. Paul turns round in the very next verse and tells the masters to knock it off, and reminds them that they have a Master too and there is no partiality with Him. Ask for what you are owed. Say it plainly. That is not a lack of faith, it is Ephesians 6:9.

There was a man five hundred years ago who said that God does not need our good works, but our neighbor does, and that the humblest task done for a neighbor is a mask that God Himself wears while He feeds and cleans and keeps the world. He meant it literally. He thought a woman with a broom and a woman with a crown were doing the same kind of work, and that only one of them usually gets thanked.