A Long Shift and a Radio

The engine started at ten to five and it has not stopped since.

The radio is on the shelf above the windscreen, wedged in with a folded cloth so it does not rattle. It has been the same station for eleven years. The early man, then the phone-in, then the weather twice, then the one who plays the old songs and talks too much between them, then the news, then the weather again.

He knows the running order of a whole day the way other men know a hymn book.

Fourteen hours. Up and back, up and back, the same headland, the dust coming up gold in the light at both ends of it and white in the middle of the day. A flask on the floor by his boot. A sandwich he will eat standing up at some point with the door open and one foot on the step.

Nobody has been in this cab but him since Wednesday.

And on Wednesday something happened, and he has not said it out loud to one single human being.

He has said it in here. Twice. Once at the far end of the second pass, out loud, to the windscreen, in a voice that came out wrong, and once about four hours later, shorter, and both times he reached up straight afterwards and turned the radio up.

That is the whole of it. Fourteen hours, a machine, a flask, and a man who has not told anybody.

At six the sky starts going and he comes back into the yard, and the engine is still ticking as it cools, and the light comes low across the gate and the dust hangs in it, and he sits there for a minute before he gets down, because getting down means going in, and going in means his face.

That is you.

Maybe not a cab. Maybe a ward at three in the morning where you are the only one awake and technically at work. Maybe a delivery route. Maybe a kitchen after everyone has gone up, with the dishwasher doing its cycle. Maybe a desk where people came past you all day and asked how you were and got the answer they were expecting.

Everybody else's life carried on. Yours stopped on a Wednesday afternoon, and you have been keeping the machine running ever since, and nobody knows.

Two things before we go any further. What has happened to you is not a failure of faith. And I am not going to explain it to you or tell you what it is for. I do not know why it happened, and I would rather sit in the cab with you and say nothing than hand you a reason with somebody's name on it.

The psalm has a word for one

Psalm 25 is a long prayer, and in the middle of it there is a line that people skip over because it is short.

Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me; for I am desolate and afflicted.Psalm 25:16

The word behind "desolate" there is a Hebrew word that means one. Solitary. The only one of its kind. It is the same word used elsewhere of an only child, the single one, the one there is no other of.

David says it about himself. Out loud. To God. He does not apologize for saying it, he does not explain how he ended up in that condition, and nothing in the psalm suggests he arranged it.

You are allowed to say the true word about how alone you have been in this, and saying it is not a complaint against anybody. Psalm 25:16 puts that word in a prayer that God kept, which settles the question of whether it is permitted, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a man the nerve to say a thing like that out loud instead of only in a cab.

And look at what David asks for. He does not ask for company to be sent to him. He asks for a face. Turn to me.

You have already been turned toward, and that did not begin at the end of the shift. What is written in that psalm is a request that God answers by being present rather than by arranging a visitor, and the Spirit of God is described as the one who has been given to be with a person and to remain, not to visit.

Nobody here is going to tell you to call somebody

Let me be plain about this, because it matters more on this subject than on any other.

I am not going to tell you who to ring. I do not know your list. I do not know whether there is a list. Half the advice given to people in your position quietly assumes a person on the other end of a phone, and a message that only works for a reader who has somebody has failed the reader it was most written for.

And I am not going to suggest that being alone in this is something you arranged. It is not. People move away. People are busy. People say the wrong thing once and you stop trying. Some of it is nobody's fault at all, and none of it is a verdict on you.

Here is what I can say instead, and it does not depend on your phone.

God's own recorded speech includes a sentence about this. I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee. Not "I will send somebody." Not "you should have more people." I, myself, will not leave.

You were not on your own in that cab today, and you were not on your own on Wednesday afternoon either. Hebrews 13:5 is God speaking in the first person about His own conduct, and the Holy Spirit is exactly how that sentence stops being a slogan and becomes something a man can feel in a machine at two in the afternoon.

Slow down on the grammar of it. The promise is about what He does. It is not about what the man manages to feel while He is doing it.

You have had company through fourteen hours of a day you thought you spent alone, and none of it was earned by getting the words out. The written promise never once makes God's presence conditional on a man's ability to speak about his situation, and His Spirit does not require you to be articulate before He is in the room.