A Humble Employee Takes It

It is always Monday and it is always in front of the others.

Not shouting. He is never anything you could write down. It is a remark about her work said in the voice you use for a joke, and then the small pause where the room decides, and then the two people who laugh because it is easier than not laughing.

She has learned to laugh too. That was the worst thing she ever learned.

She is twenty six. She is good at the job and she has the numbers to prove it, and last month she found herself rehearsing her contributions in the car so they would be short enough to get out before he could get in.

She told her mentor. A good woman, older, who has been kind to her for three years and who she trusts.

And her mentor said, gently, that a humble employee takes it. That the workplace is not about us. That she should be careful not to make it about herself, and that God honors a servant heart.

She went home and could not work out why she felt worse than before she said it.

If somebody has told you that taking it is the humble thing, then this article is for you, and I am going to be very plain.

That advice is wrong and it is not from God

Let me say it without hedging, because you have had enough hedging.

Humility has never once meant being available to be made small by another person. Your mentor is kind and she meant well and she is wrong, and being wrong about this is common enough that half the people you know would say the same thing.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is a posture you take before God, freely, on purpose, and nobody else has the authority to take it on your behalf by making you smaller in a meeting.

Now read the thing that was decided about you before anybody hired you.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.Genesis 1:27

Read it three times if you need to. That is not a compliment and it is not motivational. It is the founding fact about a human being, and it applies to you in that meeting room at ten past nine on a Monday morning.

You are made in the image of God, and that is true of you in that room and it was true while everybody was laughing. That is not my kindness to you. It is written in Genesis 1:27, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

So the question of whether a humble employee takes it is answered before it is asked. You have a dignity that God gave and no manager can spend, and it is intact right now. The word settled that before there was a company, and the same Spirit who inspired it is with you while you read this.

What is actually being taken

Here is the thing your mentor did not see, and it is not her fault because she was not in the room.

She heard your account and pictured a small indignity, and thought about the good and real Christian discipline of not needing to be respected. That discipline exists. It is a fine thing.

But that is not what happens on Mondays.

What happens on Mondays is that a person with power over your income makes you smaller in front of the people you work with, weekly, in a way you cannot answer without looking like the problem. And the evidence that it is doing something to you is in your own account: you are rehearsing sentences in the car to make yourself smaller before you arrive, so that there is less of you for him to reduce.

That is not a servant heart being formed. That is a person being trained.

And here is the plainest way to put it. Humility is a posture you take. What is happening on Mondays is a posture being taken off you by somebody else, and those two are opposites wearing the same word.

You have a dignity that was given rather than earned, and nothing done to you in a meeting can transfer it to anybody. Genesis 1 puts the image of God in a human being as a fact; His Spirit is the one who lets a person see clearly what is being done to them without any of it becoming their fault.

Now, plainly, and this is the part of the page that matters most. Nothing here is telling you to stay in that job and nothing here is telling you to leave it. I do not know your rent, your visa, your family, your industry or your options, and any page that issued you an instruction about that would be pretending to knowledge it does not have. That decision is yours, and it belongs to the people who actually know your life, and to God.

What can be said is this. You are allowed to tell somebody who can act. Human resources, a union, a manager above him, a lawyer, an employment advice line in your country. Naming what is happening is not a failure of humility and it is not making it about yourself. And if any of this has gone as far as thinking about not being here at all, please tell somebody living today: in the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour, and if you are in danger, use your emergency number.