Why is it that we so rarely receive personal thanks from our corporate employer? Why do they wait for a quarter century to give us a gold watch but never stop in the intervening years to give us a pat on the back? It’s amazing that we continue to do our jobs with so little appreciation. Yet we do. I would argue that what drives us is not Big Brother but the little man. The reason we carry on is because we are loved by those we serve and not those who own us. The kids love their teachers, the patients love their nurses, and the clients love their lawyers. It is those to whom we bend a knee who actually make us stand taller.

“The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshiper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. Henceforth anything that took away the gesture of worship would stunt and maim him forever.” (G.K. Chesterton)

The beauty of Christianity is that we serve a God who doesn’t Lord it over us but offers us suffering service. We have a Boss who weeps with us, washes our feet, and then offers us the greatest love of all by dying for us. We work for a Boss who emptied Himself to become a worker just like us.  An undercover Boss who appreciates each and every one of us because He knows how hard our jobs are from personal experience.

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Philippians 2: 5-8)

Photo by Pablo Varela on Unsplash