His Presence Went With Her to the Third Shift

The staff room has a kettle with a limescale problem and a box of pastries somebody brought in on Monday, and it is not Monday.

Twenty to eight. She has her coat half off and her badge still turned round the wrong way and her hands smell like the soap from the dispenser by the door, which is the smell of her whole life now if she is honest about it.

Third of four. That is the arithmetic she is running and has been running since Sunday. Third of four, and then Saturday, and Saturday is a real day where a real person lives.

She is good at this work. Genuinely good, the kind of good where the new ones watch her hands. She spoke to a frightened man in bay three tonight and said the thing that settled him and it was the right thing and she meant it.

And she was not there. She has not been there for a while. There is a woman who does the shifts and a woman who lives, and the one who lives is waiting for Saturday, and the one who does the shifts is somewhere behind a set of eyes at twenty to eight in the morning.

Sister, sit down for four minutes before you go out to the car. Because there is an exchange in Exodus between a very tired man and God, and God answers a scheduling question with something else entirely.

He answers the tiredness with a presence and not a date

Moses is at the end of himself. He has a nation on his hands, he has just been through the worst chapter of his leadership, and he says to God, in effect, if You are not coming with us, do not send us anywhere at all.

And he said, My presence shall go with thee, and I will give thee rest.Exodus 33:14

Two clauses, and they are joined for a reason.

My presence shall go with thee. Not I will meet you at the end of it. Not there will be a Saturday. He commits to the going, which is to say to the middle of the thing, the walking part, the part with sand in it.

And then, in the same breath, I will give thee rest. Rest is offered inside the journey, not after it. It is not the destination in that sentence. It is a thing handed to a man who is still walking.

You are being met inside the shift rather than after it, and the rest in that verse was handed to somebody who still had the whole desert in front of him. That is not a comfortable reading offered to a tired woman; Exodus 33:14 joins the presence and the rest in one sentence about a journey, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a conversation on a mountain and stands it up in a staff room with a limescaled kettle. Saturday was never where He was waiting.

Now the second half, and this is the one you have been quietly living by without examining it.

You have divided yourself in two. There is the working one and the living one, and you have decided the living one is the real one, and you are storing her up for the weekend. It is an efficient arrangement and it gets a person through a schedule.

But it costs you four days out of every five, and it is not what Scripture describes anywhere. The men and women in that book are not waiting to become themselves. They are themselves in the field, at the well, on the road, in the prison, at the loom.

You are one person and the woman on this shift is her, not a stand in kept going until Saturday. Colossians 3:23 says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a dignity rather than a demand, because the verse puts the Lord on the receiving end of ordinary work at twenty to eight in the morning. There is no understudy. There is only you, doing this.

What rest actually is, since it is plainly not Saturday

Let me get precise about the word, because you deserve better than a nice sentiment about it.

The rest offered in that verse is not sleep and it is not time off. God offers Moses rest while the man is standing in the middle of the hardest assignment of his life, which means it is a condition of the inside of a person rather than a state of their diary.

Jesus says the same thing in different words. Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest (Matthew 11:28). Notice He does not say lay down the labor first. He addresses people who are actively carrying and offers something to them while they carry.

You have rest available on this shift, and it does not require the shift to be over. Matthew 11:28 has Him offering it to people in the middle of laboring, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that offer live in a body that is still on its feet. What He gives is not the end of the work. It is the end of doing it out of your own reserves.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it matters more than your schedule.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not the sharpness of a woman on hour eleven. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.