The Order That Went Out Right

Aisle fourteen, bay six, and he checks it twice even though the scanner has already beeped.

He does not have to. The scanner is the system and the system says it is right. But he turns the box and reads the label with his own eyes, because a scanner reads a barcode and a barcode can be on the wrong box, and once, four years ago, he caught one that would have gone to a hospital.

Nobody knows about that. He never mentioned it. There was nothing to mention: an order went out correctly, which is what orders do.

Eight years of that. Roughly two hundred picks a shift, checked twice, and the double-checking adds maybe eleven minutes to his day and has never once appeared in any figure anybody measures him by.

And on Monday his team leader, who is decent enough, said something about hitting rate, and he found himself thinking on the walk to the van: the eleven minutes I spend making sure nothing goes wrong is the part of my job that counts for nothing here.

That is your aisle. That is your eleven minutes. And I want to talk about who those eleven minutes have actually been for, because I do not think it is the company and I do not think it ever was.

Who the service is aimed at

Paul writes to people doing hard work for other people's benefit, most of them with no power in the arrangement at all, and he redirects the whole thing in one move.

With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord.Ephesians 6:7-8

As to the Lord, and not to men. He does not say pretend the boss is God. He says the service you are rendering is actually going somewhere else, and the somewhere else receives it.

And look at with good will. That is the phrase for the extra: the part nobody can compel, nobody measures, and nobody has to give. That is your eleven minutes exactly.

You have been serving the Lord in that aisle for eight years. Not the company, though the company benefits. The written word redirects the service itself, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a live fact in a man with a scanner rather than a verse about employment.

Now let me name something about your double-checking that you may never have named.

Nobody taught you that. It is not in the process. You invented it, quietly, because you worked out that at the other end of every pick is a person, and that a scanner does not care about that person and you do.

That is not diligence. Diligence is doing the job properly. This is something else: it is care aimed at somebody you will never meet and who will never know your name.

You have been spending good will on strangers. Whatsoever good thing any man doeth, says the written word, and it makes no exception for good done to people who cannot thank you because they do not know it happened. The Holy Spirit has been at your shoulder for every one of the eleven minutes.

And there is the hospital box, four years ago.

Somewhere there is a person who received the right thing, on the right day, and has no idea that anything nearly went differently. They are simply a person whose ordinary week stayed ordinary. That is the most invisible form of good there is, and it is still good, and it still happened.

You have prevented harm you will never be able to point to. The written word says the doer of the good thing shall receive of the Lord, which puts the receipt in God's hands and not in the reporting. The Holy Spirit was in aisle fourteen that day too.