The other extreme of youth unemployment in Uganda is a messianic treatment of our workplace superiors.

Your biggest fear shouldn’t be that one day you will lose that dear job, but that in case you eventually do, it shouldn’t be because you failed to do your best.

Many of us, even us professing believers, are so intimate with our jobs and we can’t imagine disagreeing, questioning or standing for what is right in the place we spend 90 percent of our waking hours.

When Paul wrote to the Colossians, he urged them to work unto The Lord (Col 3:23), theirs, of course, was a different environment, yet the principle remains, that those who’ve got a regenerate heart need not get stuff solely done for the approval of man, whose eyes are never satisfied (Prov. 27:20) .

And I hope nobody hears me pushing for insubordination, impressing your supervisor is great, but it’s not the primary thing, like the British apologist CS Lewis advised, “Christians aim for heaven so that everything earthly is thrown in”, including your boss’s applause.

But in an age like ours, where business cards often serve as identity cards, we are better off clarifying who actually pays our monthly, or for that matter, life bills.

And if we think, even if for a while, that the executive office we report to gives us “this day our daily bread (Matt 6:11), ” then maybe our Bibles have probably been rusty for a while.

God’s Word is not silent on how we should conduct ourselves before those he has placed above us along our career.

Again and again, he reminds us the curse of trusting in man and drawing strength from mere flesh” (Jer 17:5), urging us not to fear those who have but “mere breath in their nostrils(Isaiah 2:22) ”

Jesus takes it a notch higher with reminders to not only fear him who can kill the body but fear him who can kill both body and soul(Matt 10:28). As if to drive the point home, he later introduces the welfare of bird species into the discussion.

King Solomon (the wealthiest there’s ever been) calls the fear of man “a snare.” (Prov 29:25) But, in front of our desktops, the apostles’ attitude in Acts is worth emulating too, “We would rather obey God rather than men. (Acts 5:29)”

In board rooms often ridden with aggressive, even dehumanizing competition,  people-pleasing, termination letters, cliques, gossip, goals and ingratiation, believers are better off leaning on the everlasting arms (Duet 33:27), arms that do not depend on project grants and market forces to sustain their subjects, arms that feed the birds of the air, give the Lions their prey(Ps 104:21), and own  “cattle on a thousand hills.”(Ps 50:10)

The arms of a living God.

Your bet at being the best employee will come when you remember your work is always and primarily in the audience of one, with every other audience secondary, if at all.

“The earth and the fullness thereof belongs to The Lord” (Ps 24:1) – not your boss, live like that, Dear Christian, and witness a revolution in your 8-5pm!