The Shift He Took at Twenty

Ray took nights because his father had a bad winter in 1994 and somebody had to hold the man's spot until spring. That was the whole of it. One winter. Ray was twenty, he had a girl he was serious about, and he figured he would be back on days by April.

He is fifty-one.

The plant makes gaskets. The night shift runs ten to six, and Ray has run the second line on it for thirty-one years, which means he has gone to work in the dark and come home in the dark for most of his life. He knows which vending machine takes the old dollar. He knows every man who ever cried in the break room at four in the morning, and he knows not to mention it after. He is, by any measure anybody at that plant would use, the best there is at what he does.

If you ask him about it, he says: it's steady.

He is not lying. It is steady. It has covered a mortgage and two kids and one of them through school, and it paid for his father's funeral in 2011 without anybody having to ask anybody for anything. Ray is not a man with a grievance. That is what makes this hard to see.

Here is what a person does not see: he has never been to a Friday football game his son played in. He and his wife have eaten dinner together at a table something like nine hundred times in twenty-six years. He does not know his neighbors. He sleeps from eight to three and everyone in his family knows to be quiet, and they have all been quiet for so long that quiet is now the sound of his house. When his daughter got engaged she called him at two in the afternoon and woke him up and apologized for it, and Ray said, no, honey, that's fine, and meant it, and then lay there in the dark at two in the afternoon with his heart going.

The snag came in June. The plant hired a kid, twenty-two, and put him on Ray's line, and about a month in the kid said, "So how long you been on nights?"

Ray said, "A while."

The kid said, "Like, five years?"

And Ray heard himself say the real number out loud, out of his own mouth, for the first time in a very long time. Thirty-one. And the kid said, "Man," and did not say anything else, and neither did Ray. They just stood there under the lights with the line running.

You have a number like that. Something you took on for a season, that stopped being a season, that everybody including you has a good clean word for. And every so often somebody asks a plain question and the real figure comes out and stands there in the room.

Who was awake for all of it

Let me be straight about what I am not doing, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you what your situation is. I cannot see it from here. It could be a shift, a house, a role, a debt, something you agreed to in a hard year that nobody has ever come back and released you from. I am not handing you a word for it. I am not telling you to quit it and I am not telling you to stay in it, because I cannot see your life and I would be a fool to act like I could.

What I will do is take you to a psalm that most people read for the wrong verse.

Everybody knows Psalm 139 for the fearfully and wonderfully made part. Fine. But back up to verse three, because there is a line in there written for a man who works nights.

Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:3

Acquainted. Not informed. Not aware of. Acquainted, the way a man is acquainted with a road he has driven a thousand times. And look at the pairing: my path and my lying down. The going out and the sleeping. The hours everybody sees and the hours nobody does.

Thirty-one years of eight in the morning to three in the afternoon in a dark room while the world went about its day. Nobody was there for those. God was acquainted with every one of them.

You have been in company through the hours that nobody else on earth was awake to see, and that company is not a feeling, it is a line in a psalm. Psalm 139:3 puts the lying down beside the path deliberately, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm off a page and lays it over a life that has been running on second shift for three decades.

Then the psalm does something better. Verse eleven.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day.Psalm 139:11-12

That is not a poem about the dark being scary. That is a man saying: there is a portion of my life that happens where nobody is looking, and God says, the night shines like the day to Me. The unwitnessed part of your life is not the unwitnessed part to Him. There is no unwitnessed part.

You were never living an unseen life, however many years of it happened while the rest of the county slept. That is Psalm 139:12 and it is written down where anybody can check it, and His Spirit is what makes an old song a present fact.

Steady is a true word that is not the whole word

Here is where I want to be careful, because a message like this goes bad fast if it gets clumsy.

Steady is not a lie. Ray's word is a true word. The shift was steady, and steady fed people, and there is real honor in a man who does a hard thing for thirty-one years and never once made a speech about it. I am not here to take a good word away from anybody or to talk you out of being proud of what you carried.

You have never been required to run your life down to a word that fits in a break room, and the psalm is where that permission comes from. Psalm 139:3 sets the whole of a man beside God rather than a summary of him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes room for the rest of the sentence.

The trouble with steady is not that it is false. The trouble is that it is complete. It closes the sentence. Nobody asks a follow-up question after steady. It is a word with no door in it.

And the God of Psalm 139 does not use words with no door in them. He uses acquainted, which is a word that has a whole person on the other side of it.

You are known by somebody who does not stop at your summary of your own life, and He never has. Psalm 139:3 is where He says so, and the Holy Spirit is the one who will not let a true word stand in for the whole truth in front of Him.

Say this now rather than later, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the real number tonight has taken you somewhere heavy, or if what you are inside has stopped being hard and started being unsafe, do not sit alone with that. Tell somebody before morning. Your wife, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you anything about your job. That is me not leaving you out there on your own.