One Hour of the Night Shift

At two in the morning the corridor makes a sound that it does not make at any other time, which is almost nothing, and it is the almost that gets you.

Ines had stopped the cart halfway along, by the second set of doors, for no reason she could have defended. Both hands on the rail. The wheels had gone quiet. Down at the far end somebody had left the lamp on over the desk, the little one with the bent neck, and it put a warm circle on the paperwork and made the rest of the corridor look darker than it was.

Bay four had settled. Bay six had been ringing every twenty minutes since midnight and had finally gone off. Somewhere behind her a machine did the two short notes it does when it is happy, and then did not do them again.

She had eaten half a sandwich at half past eleven standing at the counter with her back to the room, and had put the other half in her locker, and knew she would find it on Thursday and throw it away, because that is what happens to the other half.

It was fine. That is the thing. It had been an entirely manageable night.

And then, standing at the cart with her hands on the rail and nothing at all going on, the counting started.

Four more hours of this one. Then Wednesday. Then Thursday, which is the long one because of the handover. Then she is off, except she is not really off, because her mother's appointment is Friday and she has to be up for it. Then the next schedule starts and there are eleven more nights in it and she has already looked at them, twice, on her phone, in bed, which she knows is the worst possible time to look at a schedule.

Eleven. Then whatever is after that. Then whatever is after that.

The arithmetic ran all the way out to the end of the year and then kept going into a kind of gray and she stood there in the corridor and let it, because there is no way of switching it off once it starts.

That is what breaks a person. Not the hour. The hour is workable. Anyone can do an hour, and she has done thousands of them, and she is good at them. What is not workable is standing in one hour holding all of the other ones at the same time, like somebody has handed you the whole schedule to carry in your arms while you are also trying to move a cart.

She looked at the lamp at the end of the corridor for a while.

Then she said, under her breath, not really to anybody: I cannot do all of it.

And she was right. That was a true sentence. She was just carrying something nobody had asked her to pick up.

There are two ways to count

There is a psalm of Moses, the ninetieth, and it has a line in it that gets read as a warning and is not one.

He asks God: teach us to number our days.

Now, a person standing in a corridor at two in the morning already numbers her days. She has numbered them all the way to Christmas. So it cannot mean that, because if numbering were the point she would be the most spiritually advanced person in the building tonight.

Read it again and notice who does the teaching. So teach us. It is a request for God to hand over a way of counting that the human being does not have. Which means there are two ways to count, and the one that arrives on its own at two in the morning is not the one Moses is asking for.

The one that arrives on its own takes every hour that has not happened yet and stacks them on top of the hour you are actually standing in. It is not planning. Planning has a pen in its hand. This is something else, and it has a weight to it, and you can feel it in your shoulders.

You are not required to carry any hour that has not arrived, and you were never issued the strength for the ones that have not. That is the arithmetic of Psalm 90:12 as Moses actually asks for it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who teaches a way of counting that a tired body can survive.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.Psalm 90:12

The hour is issued, not owed

Look at how God has always done supply, because it is embarrassingly consistent.

Bread in the wilderness came daily, and the portion that was hoarded overnight went bad by morning. Not as a punishment, and not to make anybody feel small. Because a stockpile would have ended the daily meeting, and the daily meeting was the point. Mercies are new every morning, which is a sentence that only makes sense if yesterday's are not still lying around.

So the strength for the eleven nights on that schedule does not exist yet. It is not being withheld from you and you have not failed to access it. It has not been issued, because it is issued at the hour, to the person standing in the hour, and it fits the hour exactly.

Which means the emptiness you feel when you look at the schedule is not evidence about you at all. Of course you have nothing for the eleven nights. Nobody has. You are reaching into next month for supply that is kept in this hour.

You have strength for the next sixty minutes and you are holding it right now, at the cart, with your hands on the rail. The written word gives bread for the day and mercies for the morning and never a warehouse, and the Holy Spirit brings the portion at the hour a person is standing in.

You are given this hour and not the schedule. Scripture puts the numbering in God's teaching hands rather than in yours, and His Spirit is the One who cuts an hour loose from the pile so a body can actually pick it up.

And I am not going to talk to you about the rest of it. Not the eleven nights, not Thursday, not what any of this means about how long you can go on. That is exactly the conversation that has been standing on your chest since midnight, and I am not adding to it. Two in the morning until three in the morning. That is the whole subject of this message.