He Sees In Secret

Here is a question worth sitting with, because the answer surprises most people who try it honestly.

If you could have one of two things for the work nobody notices, which would you take: a bonus, or one person who knew exactly what you did?

Almost everybody says the second, and almost everybody is slightly embarrassed by that answer, because it sounds sentimental and it is not.

It is not sentimental at all. It is structural. A person can be paid for work and still not have it exist anywhere outside themselves, and work that exists nowhere outside a person is a strange and lonely thing to carry for years.

Picture the man in this. He has done a physically hard job for a long time under an employer who is not exactly dishonest and is not exactly straight either. The terms have been adjusted. Things promised were not delivered, and were explained afterward, plausibly. Nothing he could point at.

He has done the work anyway. Every day. Properly, including the parts nobody inspects.

And what has begun to weigh on him is not the money, although the money is a real grievance. It is that the whole of it is happening in a place with no witness. The employer will never acknowledge it. The other workers have their own troubles. His own family only see the tiredness, not the work.

Twenty years of doing something well in a room where nobody is keeping the score.

The sentence God said to Jacob

There is a story in Genesis that is precisely about this, and it is one of the least preached passages that speaks directly to working life.

Jacob works for Laban for twenty years. Laban changes his wages ten times. The arrangement is technically legal every time and is designed each time so that Jacob loses.

And then God speaks to Jacob in a dream, and the sentence He says is the reason this passage belongs here.

And he said, Lift up now thine eyes, and see, all the rams which leap upon the cattle are ringstraked, speckled, and grisled: for I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee. (Genesis 31:12, King James Version)

I have seen all that Laban doeth unto thee.

Not, I will repay you. Not, I will judge him. Those things come later in the story. The first thing said to a man who has worked twenty unwitnessed years is that the work and the treatment were both seen.

You have a witness who states it plainly, and Genesis 31 has God saying I have seen all that he does unto thee before anything else is offered (Genesis 31:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sentence land on somebody who has been working with nobody keeping score.

And later Jacob says the same thing in his own words, and notice what he pairs.

Except the God of my father, the God of Abraham, and the fear of Isaac, had been with me, surely thou hadst sent me away now empty. God hath seen mine affliction and the labour of my hands, and rebuked thee yesternight. (Genesis 31:42)

Mine affliction and the work of my hands. Both of them. The hardship and the workmanship, seen together, by one witness.

You have both halves of it witnessed, and Genesis 31:42 names the affliction and the work of the hands in the same sentence (Genesis 31:42), and the Spirit of God is the one who has been present for both across twenty years.

The bottle and the book

There is an image in the psalms that is so specific it is almost startling, and it is about record keeping.

Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8)

Thou tellest. Tell there means count. He is saying that his movements have been counted, one by one.

And then the two images. A bottle for the tears, and a book. Both of them are containers for things that ordinarily evaporate without a trace.

That is an image chosen precisely for the kind of thing that leaves no evidence, which is the kind of thing this whole article is about.

You are recorded in something built to hold what would otherwise evaporate, and Psalm 56 asks for tears in a bottle and names a book in the same breath (Psalm 56:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient image about counting into a fact about a working week.

You have wanderings that have been counted, and Psalm 56:8 uses a verb about counting rather than a word about noticing in general (Psalm 56:8), and the Spirit of God is the one who does the counting nobody at the workplace has ever done.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could be misused.

This is not saying that being seen by God means the employer's behavior is fine. In the Genesis story, God explicitly says the man was being wronged, and He says so before He says anything else.

It is also not telling anybody to confront an employer or to demand what was promised. Jacob's situation resolved through circumstances that are not available to most people, and this article cannot see what a confrontation would cost anybody.

And it is not saying that wanting a human witness is a failure of faith. It is not. It is how people are built, and the story records Jacob telling his wives the whole thing out loud, which is a man getting himself a human witness.

And plainly: if the unwitnessed years have begun to reach past work, if you have started to feel that your whole life has gone unrecorded, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has started wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a job. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. There is no faith in doing that alone.

You are not being handed a substitute for justice, and Genesis 31 has the seeing stated first and the rest of it dealt with afterward (Genesis 31:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds both the wrong and the man without hurrying either.