Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men"
Colossians 3:23

"The Enemy wants to bring the man to a state of mind in which he could design the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the fact, without being any more (or less) or otherwise glad at having done it than he would be if it had been done by another."

Satan to his underling about God’s plans for man, in Screwtape Letters by CS Lewis

It has been a good day at the office for Philip Austin. Smiling, almost giddy, not able to help himself, he reads again the company announcement naming him the new head of the creative department. When finished, he carefully places the announcement in his brief case and skips back to his desk, where he notices the note from his secretary. Pat Sullivan has called again &emdash; the third time today &emdash; asking to see him. His smile fades and his stomach tightens. The last time he saw Pat the meeting did not go well, and he couldn’t face seeing her again. What else could he say? She just didn’t understand. Yet the note sat there, like rotting fruit, calling attention to itself no matter what Austin did to distract himself. He knew that, as a Christian, he would have to see her again, to try, one more time, to explain the situation.

Pat was one of the company’s three main designers on the design team led by Austin. She had worked her way up through the ranks of the design department to become the best designer Austin had working for him. Because of her skill, and because she reminded him of himself at the early stages of his career, Austin had taken it upon himself to mentor her. Over the last few years, he had granted her increasing freedom to work up new design ideas for the company. Although they needed some refinement by the design team, her designs were groundbreaking, and he had enthusiastically pushed them with the company’s Creative Department &emdash; the department he was now set to head.

Pat, however, was upset that Austin was getting all of the "credit" for her designs. While it was certainly true that he was always introduced as the designer of Pat’s work, he tried to explain to her that it is, and always has been, company strategy to associate specific furniture lines with a specific, well-known designer name, as people were not buying furniture, but prestige. He explained that in reality, everyone in the company and, indeed, everyone in the industry, knew that behind the Phillip Austin name was a team of designers. This was simply how things were done, and that in his own career his best designs were created under the name of the legendary designer Leon Bach. He assured her that he would see to it that she would take over his old slot as head of the design team, and that her turn as "name" designer would come. But she was not to be placated, going so far as to accuse him of being a typical Christian hypocrite.

He wondered: Was he really being hypocritical? Didn’t Irving Berlin have a whole team of ghost songwriters and Edison a team of ghost inventors? Isn’t it okay to think about the company’s marketing interests? In a market economy, isn’t "celebrity" much more difficult to create, and therefore more valuable, than the best designed furniture? Didn’t Pat get a much larger audience for her designs than she could ever have gotten on her own? Didn’t he read recently that much of what is "written" by Christian authors is actually written by someone else, with no credit given? And isn’t this done solely for marketing reasons? After all, who would buy a book written by Nancy Pearcy instead of Chuck Colson? Feeling better, Austin punched in Pat’s number to try one more time.