Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Therefore this is what I will do to you, Israel,
    and because I will do this to you, Israel,
    prepare to meet your God.”
He who forms the mountains,
    who creates the wind,
    and who reveals his thoughts to mankind,
who turns dawn to darkness,
    and treads on the heights of the earth—
    the Lord God Almighty is his name.

• Amos 4:12-13

“When God says ‘I,’ then there is revelation. God could have let the world follow its course and kept quiet about it. Why should God find it necessary to talk about himself? When God says ‘I,’ then this is grace. When God says ‘I,’ then he is simply saying everything, the first and the last. When God says ‘I,’ then that means: ‘Prepare to meet your God’ (Amos 4:12). ‘I am the Lord’—not a lord but the Lord. With this, God claims all lordship for himself alone. All right to command and all obedience belong to him and him alone. By bearing witness to himself as the Lord, God frees us from all human slavery. We serve God alone and no human being. Even when we carry out the orders of earthly masters, We in truth serve God alone. It is a great human error of many Christians to believe that God has subjected us in our earthly life to many other masters besides himself and that our life now stays in constant conflict between his commandment and the orders of these earthly masters. … All earthly authority is based on the authority of God alone; in it they have authority and honor. Otherwise it is usurpation and has no claim to obedience. … Obedience to God alone is the foundation of our freedom.”

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I Want to Live These Days with You (devotion for February 7, devotions compiled from his writings)

I have had a few crazy bosses.  They gave instructions that did not make sense.  Sometimes they would say to do something that was impossible.  With that boss, the other guys in the group joked about me being the miracle worker.  They put up a sign outside my cubicle “Miracles done while you wait.  The impossible might take a while.”  That just encouraged the boss to dream up things that were even more ridiculous, just to test my limits.

I had bosses that were cruel.  One boss had his hands around my neck to choke me to death, but the VP of sales pulled him off me.  I preferred that to the boss who ignored me, not even greeting me in the morning – for months on end.

But in reading this devotion from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, I was really serving God.

In a way, I was.  I never called my boss an idiot.  I did what he said to do, even though it made no sense to do it, much less do it the way he said do it.

The apostle Paul talks about slaves being subject to their masters.  The point is that we glorify God by doing what we do to the best of our abilities.  I never had to break God’s Law with the assignments given to me.  If I pulled off a miracle, it was God working through me.  I was not a “miracle worker.”  To those that did not put in the effort with an artistic flare, it just seemed to be a miracle.

Until I read this devotion, I had always been taught that God is sovereign, and we would not have our idiot boss unless God had a reason for that person to be the boss.

But what Dietrich Bonhoeffer says here makes a lot more sense.  I was always working for God.  And as each earthly boss did something bad to me for no reason other than he could, God was looking to me to see how I would respond.  Would I do a poor job in protest?  Would I lash out in anger?  Or would I say, “Sure boss, I will get right on it” and then I would do the best that I could to do what others thought impossible.

I did not have too many bad bosses that I could never count them all.  I had one Boss, who loves me, and I love Him.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.