I Made My Work Smaller So He Could Not Reach It

Here is a defense that nobody ever recognizes as a defense, because from the outside it looks like sensible caution.

Picture a man who used to write long proposals. Detailed ones. He liked doing it. He was good at it, and twice something he wrote changed how a whole department did a thing.

Then he got a manager who found something wrong with every one of them.

Not big things. That is important. Never the argument, never the substance. A formatting choice. A figure he would have presented differently. A tone question. Delivered in front of others, usually with a small sigh first.

So the man did something entirely reasonable, one step at a time, over about eighteen months. He made the proposals shorter. Then he stopped including the part he was proudest of, because that was the part that got picked at. Then he started sending things as a two line email instead, because a two line email has almost no surface area.

There is nothing left to criticize now. He solved the problem.

And it cost him the only part of his job he actually liked.

That is the trade and almost nobody sees themselves making it. The criticism was painful, but it lasted ninety seconds. The defense against it has removed something from his working life permanently, and it will not come back on its own, and there is nobody in that building who will ever notice it has gone. Not the manager, who is satisfied, and not the colleagues, who assume this is what he does.

The only person who knows what has been given up is him, and he cannot even complain about it, because he did it himself.

The man who explained himself honestly

There is a moment in the parable of the talents that gets skipped over because everybody rushes to the ending, and the skipped part is the most human sentence in it.

The third servant is asked what he did with what he was given, and here is his answer.

And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. (Matthew 25:25, King James Version)

I was afraid. He says it plainly. He does not claim he was being prudent, or careful, or a good steward of a limited resource, although he could have argued any of those and they would have sounded reasonable.

He tells the truth about the mechanism. Fear first, burying second.

You are looking at a fear rather than at a strategy, and Matthew 25 has the man himself naming fear as the reason before he names the hiding (Matthew 25:25), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person see their own caution accurately without it turning into shame.

And look at what he was afraid of. A few verses earlier he describes his master as a hard man. Whether that description is fair is a separate argument. What matters is that he was managing a relationship, not a resource. The burying was a response to a person.

You have been organizing your work around one man rather than around the work, and Matthew 25:25 shows the burying as a response to a person rather than to the task, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that visible before another eighteen months goes by.

Not a spirit of fear

There is a sentence Paul wrote to a young man who had gone quiet, and the context is worth knowing. Timothy was leading something difficult, he was young, and Paul is writing to get him to pick something back up.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7)

Notice the third item, because it is the one people forget. A sound mind. Not recklessness. Not bravado.

Which means the answer to the shrinking is not to become defiant, or to write a forty page proposal out of spite, or to stop caring what anybody thinks. It is a sound mind, which is the ability to size a piece of work by what the work needs rather than by what one man might say about it.

You have been handed power and love and a sound mind rather than a spirit of fear, and 2 Timothy 1:7 lists all three in one line (2 Timothy 1:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies the soundness when a man's own judgment has been bent around somebody else for a year and a half.

And there is a line in Colossians about who work is actually done for, and it settles the audience question completely.

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

Heartily. Which is a word about size and wholeness. And then the audience: as to the Lord, and not unto men.

That is not saying the manager does not exist. It is saying he is not the one the work is measured for.

You are working for an audience that was named a long time ago, and Colossians 3 says as to the Lord, and not unto men, in exactly those words (Colossians 3:23), and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that a practical fact on a Thursday rather than a poster on a wall.

What this is not

Let me draw the line, because this could be turned into something reckless.

This is not telling anybody to defy their manager, or to ignore feedback, or to make a point by handing in something enormous. That is not courage, it is a different kind of reaction to the same man, and it would cost the reader more than it costs him.

It is also not saying that every shortening was wrong. Some of that feedback may have been right. Shorter is often better. The question is not length, it is whether the sizing decision is being made by the work or by the fear.

And it is not promising the criticism stops if the work is good. It probably does not. This is not a strategy for winning him over.

And plainly: if the shrinking has spread past work, if you have started making yourself smaller everywhere, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a manager. 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. That is not a failure of faith.

You are not being sent to prove a point, and 2 Timothy 1 puts a sound mind in the same sentence as the power rather than leaving it out (2 Timothy 1:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between courage and reaction in a person who is tired.