The Night Shift Nobody Asked Me To Work

Twenty to midnight, and he is sitting on the edge of the bed with one sock off.

Downstairs the washing machine has reached the spin and started to knock again, walking a little across the kitchen floor the way it has done since the spring. Knock. Pause. Knock.

He does not decide to begin. The chain begins on its own, the way rain finds the same crack in a wall every time it comes. If the machine goes, then the launderette. If the launderette, then the thing he has been putting off on the van. If the van, then the stall. If the stall, then what is he.

The stall is the household one in the covered hall, third along from the doors: brushes, buckets, batteries, keys cut while you wait. His father stood behind it before him. Two years ago that aisle was three deep on a Saturday. Now the same handful come through before eleven, he knows every one of them by name, and the sound in the hall at half past two is one radio and his own shoes.

The pitch rent does not know any of that. It comes in the way the tide comes in, on its own schedule, whatever kind of weather the week has been.

So he works the shift. Nobody rostered him for it and nobody is paying him for it. He clocks on somewhere around eleven every night and works it through to the end of the chain, which is always the same end, and then he lies down in the dark and starts it again from the top.

At some point he goes down and stands in the kitchen with his hand flat on the machine while it finishes. It shudders, slows, stops. The floor is dry. The kettle is where he left it. Not one thing in this room has broken tonight.

And you know that kitchen. You would not still be reading at this hour if you did not.

The shift nobody rostered you on

Let me name it before I say anything else about it, because it has been running for a long time without a name, and a thing without a name is very hard to put down.

What happens in that kitchen at night is not unbelief. It is arithmetic, done carefully, by somebody who cannot afford to be wrong. People with something set aside behind them run the same chain and it stops after one link, because there is a floor under them and they hit it early. There is no floor under you, so the chain runs the whole way down every time it starts, and a body learns that route the way it learns a road home.

Nobody who has a floor under them gets to call that fear a failure of trust. I will not, and God has not.

So hear this in the kitchen where you are standing. You have permission, given in writing, to put the whole weight of that chain down on somebody stronger: 1 Peter 5:7 says to cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that an actual transfer in an actual kitchen rather than a good line in a book.

Cast is a physical word. It is what a man does with a line off a jetty: the whole weight leaves his hand and lands somewhere else entirely. Not shared. Not halved. Moved.

What the psalm says about the man who cannot sleep

There is a verse written for the exact hour of that kitchen, and it is not the one people usually reach for.

It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

Read who that is about. He is a working man. He is up before the market and back after dark, and the psalm never tells him to stop working, and neither will I. If there are hours going, take them. If there is help going that a person in that house can claim, reach for it with both hands and no shame at all. Faith has hands, and using them is what they are for.

The vanity is not the work. It is the bread of anxious toil, which is the meal a man eats at twenty to midnight with one sock off. That is the part of the night that produces nothing. The chain has been run hundreds of times in that kitchen and it has never once moved the pitch rent.

Then the turn, and it is the tenderest half sentence in the psalm: for he gives to his beloved sleep. Sleep is handed over there as a gift and not earned as a wage, and the man receiving it in that verse is short.

You are His beloved tonight, at twenty to midnight, on the edge of a bed, with nothing set aside behind you. That word over you was not issued on the strength of what is in the tin. Psalm 127:2 puts it in the written word as His to give, and the Holy Spirit has been saying it over that kitchen for longer than anybody in it has noticed.

And while the night shift was being worked down there, Someone else was on it too, and He was on it first. Psalm 121:4 says the One who keeps you neither slumbers nor sleeps. Two of you have been awake over that house every night, and only one of you was rostered for it, and it was never you. You are covered by a watch that has never once been left empty, and His Spirit is the witness of it in you on the nights you feel nothing at all.

It comes in the morning, and it comes again in the morning

There is a pattern all the way through Scripture and it is deliberately inconvenient. God gives daily. He fed a whole nation in a desert with bread that would not keep overnight, and He did it for years, and not one family in that camp ever got a cupboard out of Him.

His mercies are new every morning, Lamentations 3:23, and new is the word that costs something. New means they were not in the cupboard last night. There is no way to draw tomorrow's grace at twenty to midnight, and that is not God being careful with it. It is God keeping you on speaking terms with Him.

Now hear me plainly, because this is where somebody always slides one thing into another. That is a word about grace and it is not a word about money, and what God does about the pitch rent is His, however He answers.

But this you have, and you have it in the written word: sufficient. You are inside enough today, right now, with the tin counted twice and nothing behind you, because His grace is measured to the day a person is actually standing in, and the Holy Spirit is the One delivering it to that hour and to no other.