Washing Up the Plates: Why God Cares About Your Monday

Think about how you actually spent last week.

Not the highlights. The real hours. Answering email. Sitting in traffic. Reheating something for dinner. Finishing a task nobody will ever compliment you on. Loading the dishwasher again, because it is always again.

If you have been a Christian for any length of time, you have probably absorbed a quiet assumption about all of that: it is the neutral part. The part that does not count. Real spiritual life happens on Sunday, or in the twenty minutes you manage to read your Bible, or on the mission trip. The rest is just what you do between the parts that matter.

Colossians disagrees, and it is worth understanding why — because that assumption is quietly exhausting.

The most surprising sentence is aimed at the least important person

Paul is writing to a first-century household, and the person he addresses about work is a bondservant. Someone with no status, no leverage, no way out. In the Roman world these were the people whose labor was invisible by definition.

Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ. — Colossians 3:23-24

Read that again with the audience in mind. Paul tells the person with the least power in the room that his labor is service rendered directly to Christ, and that there is an inheritance attached to it.

Nobody talked that way. Work was what you did because you had to. Paul says it is what you offer.

And then he turns to the man who owns him: Masters, treat your bondservants justly and fairly, knowing that you also have a Master in heaven. The most powerful person in the household is told, publicly, that he is not the final authority either.

Paul lifts the low and levels the high, in two sentences.

A monk who could not get to the important work

In the seventeenth century a man named Nicholas Herman joined a Carmelite monastery in Paris and was given the kitchen. He took the name Brother Lawrence. He spent decades cooking meals and scrubbing pots for people who were, by every visible measure, doing the more significant spiritual work.

He was not remembered for anything he built. He was remembered because of what he noticed.

The time of business does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquility as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament.

He was not saying he had learned to endure the kitchen. He was saying the kitchen had stopped being an interruption. God was as available at the sink as at the altar.

And he left a poem that has outlasted almost everything written by the people he cooked for:

Since I have no time to be a great saint by doing lovely things, or watching late with thee, or dreaming in the dawn light, or storming heaven’s gates, make me a saint by getting meals and washing up the plates.

The sentence worth taking with you

Here is the way it was put at Christchurch on Sunday, and it is worth sitting with:

Your work is as important to God as God is important to your work.

That cuts both directions, which is what makes it useful.

It means the ordinary thing you are about to go do this afternoon is not spiritually neutral. Done honestly, offered to Him, it is worship. The contract drawn up carefully. The room actually cleaned. The patient treated like a person. The code that works. The meal.

And it means the reverse is also true — that when God is squeezed out of your work, your work does not stay neutral. It becomes something else. It starts asking you for things only God can give.

What goes wrong when work carries too much

Work for money and you are a dog chasing its tail; there is always a number above the one you reached. Work for status and you have handed strangers the authority to tell you what you are worth. Work for identity and every setback becomes a verdict on you as a person.

That is when a job stops being a job and becomes an idol — and idols are not passive. They take. They take your evenings, then your marriage, then your relationship with your kids, and eventually they take your ability to do the work well, because terror is a poor craftsman.

There is a mercy hidden in Colossians 3 here. If your work is service to God, the result is His business. You are responsible for the integrity of the offering, not for controlling the outcome. Most of the pressure you carry is pressure to guarantee results — and it was never yours to guarantee.

Leave the result to Him, and it becomes possible to enjoy the work again.

Integrity is the whole thing

Notice the phrase Paul rules out: not by way of eye-service, as people-pleasers.

Eye-service is the version of your job you perform when someone is watching. We all know how to do it. The report that looks thorough. The busyness that reads as productivity.

The alternative Paul names is integrity — which literally means being integrated, undivided. What you do matching who you are, whether or not anyone checks.

That is why the unwitnessed work matters so much. Not because God is monitoring you, but because those are the hours where what you actually are gets built.

Three things for the next ordinary day

Name one task as an offering before you start it. Not the whole day. One task. The email, the shift, the dishes. Say quietly that it is for Him, and then do it well.

Do one piece of unwitnessed work properly. The thing nobody will inspect. That is where integrity is made.

Give Him the result when you are done. You did the work. The outcome is not your department, and you were never strong enough to carry it anyway.

None of this will feel dramatic. Brother Lawrence’s did not either. He washed up, for decades, and somehow the noise and clatter of his kitchen became the place he knew God best.

Your Monday is not the part of your life that does not count. It may turn out to be most of what your life was.

Frequently asked questions