He Finished the Shift

Eight in the morning, van parked at the back of the supply yard, engine running for the heater. A coffee in the cup holder with the lid still on. The phone rings through the speakers, because that is how the van is set up, and he answers it with one hand still resting on the gearshift.

It takes four minutes.

There is a word in there somewhere that he has heard on the news and never once about himself. There is a date. There is a sentence that begins with "I want to be straight with you," and after that his ears do something odd, and the man keeps talking, and he catches maybe one word in three.

He says, right. He says, no, I understand. He says, thanks for telling me straight, which is a strange thing to be grateful for at eight o'clock on a Tuesday morning.

Then the call ends, and the radio comes back on. Mid song. At exactly the volume it was at before.

And he drives to the job.

He gets there at half past. He unloads. He measures, and he measures again, because that is what you do. The apprentice asks him about the game and he answers, and the answer comes out of his mouth in an ordinary voice, in ordinary words, and it is correct. He eats a sandwich at noon sitting sideways in the driver's seat and could not tell you afterward what was in it.

He finishes what was booked for that day. All of it. He sweeps the floor, because he always sweeps the floor. He tells the customer he will be back Thursday to sort out the trim, and then he remembers, and then he says it anyway, because what else is there to say standing in somebody's hallway at half past four.

Six o'clock. Back at the house. He does not go in yet.

He drops the tailgate and sits on it with his boots hanging down, the way he has sat on that tailgate a thousand times with a mug of coffee, thinking about nothing much, listening to the road.

And his hands start shaking.

Not a tremble. Both of them, properly, out of nowhere, ten hours late.

He looks at them like they belong to somebody else. Inside the house a kettle is going on. Somebody laughs at something on a screen. The neighbor's car door goes. The evening is behaving completely normally, and out here a grown man is sitting on the back of his own van watching his own hands shake.

That is you, and it does not have to be a tailgate. It might be the car door closing in the parking garage before you go up. It might be the moment the last child is finally asleep. It might be a second cup of coffee you did not want, standing at the counter at half past nine, when your body finally puts down what it has been carrying since the phone rang.

You held it all day. Then it caught up with you.

Hear this before anything else. What happened in your body at six o'clock is not a failure of faith. Nobody up there is disappointed in your hands. And I am not going to explain your morning to you, because I do not know why it happened, and there is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason and it is not comfort at all.

The psalm never asks the mountains to stay put

Here is what I want you to see about the verse this whole message stands on, and it is close to the opposite of the way it usually gets handed to people.

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.Psalm 46:1-2

Read what it grants. It grants the earth being removed. It grants mountains going into the sea, which is not a small local difficulty, it is the whole horizon changing shape while a man stands there watching. The psalm does not argue with any of it. It never tells the singer the mountain was not really that big, and it never tells him what the mountain was for.

It puts a refuge in the middle of it and leaves the sea moving.

You are in trouble, and the help this psalm names is described as already present, not on its way to you. That is not my opinion about your Tuesday. The words in Psalm 46:1 describe a shelter a man gets into rather than a feeling he manufactures, and the Holy Spirit is the one Jesus called the Helper, which is a job description and not a poem. Help that has to arrive can be late. Help that is present cannot be.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It never promises the singer that the mountains come back out of the sea.

I want to be honest with you about that, because you've probably had three people this week tell you how all this turns out. I do not know how it turns out. What is written here is about who is with you inside it, and that is a different promise, and it happens to be the one that is actually being made.

What was holding you at eleven o'clock this morning

You worked a whole day on top of that call. Ten hours of it. You measured twice. You stayed civil with a customer who wanted to talk about grout.

Most men I know would call that coping, and then quietly feel like a fraud for it. Let me offer you something better than coping.

You were carried through every one of those hours, and you did not feel a single one of them being carried. The word for strength in Psalm 46 is a fortified place, something built long before the trouble came and standing while it comes, and the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is described as living in ordinary men getting through ordinary Tuesdays. You did not generate that this morning. You would not have known how.

That is why the hands came at six. Not because anything failed at four. Because at six there was finally room.

Your body waited until the day was done, until the apprentice had gone home, until the trim was sorted and the floor was swept, and only then did it say the true thing. That is not weakness arriving late. That is honesty arriving, and it waited politely until you could afford it.

You have a floor under you tonight that the eight o'clock phone call never touched. Scripture calls Him a refuge and a fortress, both of them words for something that was standing before the news and is unaffected by it, and His Spirit is what makes a plain sentence like that carry weight in a man sitting on a tailgate. The job was on the ground. The plan for next year was on the ground. God was never on the ground.