Four On, Four Off

Dez has been on nights at the bread plant for nine years and he calls it the tax.

Not bitterly. That is what surprises people. He says it cheerfully, in the car park, with a roll in one hand: "Yeah, well. It is the tax, innit."

The tax on what, though. That is the bit he does not usually finish, and if you push him he will tell you: the house, the girls, the fact that Chantelle can do three days instead of five, the caravan that is not paid off but is at least a caravan.

Twelve hours. Four on, four off. Six at night till six in the morning, in a building where the ovens make it eighty degrees at one end and the chill store makes it four at the other, and the noise is such that everybody lip-reads without noticing they are doing it.

He is good at it. That should be said. He is the one they put on the wrapper when it is playing up.

But in nine years he has never once described the job as anything other than something he is getting through in order to have a life. And a man who has been getting through something for nine years has done a strange piece of arithmetic on himself, because nine years is not an interval. Nine years is a substantial portion of a life.

Sylvia did thirty-one years on that line.

Her last shift was in the February and they did the thing with the card and the cake at three in the morning in the canteen, and somebody, one of the young ones, asked her the question everybody wanted to ask.

"Syl, how did you do thirty-one years of this?"

And Sylvia, who is not sentimental and who once threw a tray at a supervisor, said this:

"I stopped waiting for it to turn into something else. About year four, that was. That is the whole of it, love."

And then she said, "It is not a stage. And it is not a punishment either, whatever anybody tells you. It is just where I have been. And God has been on this side of the doors the entire time, which took me long enough to work out."

Then she looked round the canteen at half past three in the morning and said, "It is still a horrible shift, mind. Both of them are true."

Dez has thought about that more than he expected to.

Now let me ask you what you call yours.

Because you have a word for it. The tax. The grind. Paying my dues. Just for now. Until the other thing happens. And the word is doing something to you every single time you say it, which is quietly informing you that the hours you are actually living are not the ones that count.

Where you already are is where you were placed

Paul is settling an argument in Corinth about whether people should change their circumstances now that they have come to faith, and he says something that he repeats three times in twenty verses because he knows nobody will believe it the first time.

Only, as the Lord has assigned to each one, as God has called each, in this manner let him walk.1 Corinthians 7:17

As God has called each. Not called out of. Called, in it. Paul takes the word we save for dramatic redirection and applies it to where a person already is.

And in this manner let him walk, which is not a sentence about resignation. Walking is a verb about going somewhere. He is saying that the road runs through the place you are standing rather than starting at some other address.

So hear this over you, in the car park at six in the morning. You are placed, and the nine years are not an interval before your life, they are your life, and God has been on this side of the doors the whole time. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes an ordinary shift a place where a person is actually with God, which is not a figure of speech and not a consolation prize.

Now let me be careful, because there is a version of this message that is a lie and I want no part of it.

I am not going to tell you the shift is beautiful.

It is not. It is eighty degrees at one end and four at the other and your knees hurt and you have missed things you will not get back, and anybody who romanticises that has never done it and is not talking to you.

Sylvia had it exactly right and she said both halves. This is where I have been, and God has been here, and it is still a horrible shift. Both are true, and a message that gives you one without the other is not worth the paper.

What changes is not the work. What changes is the arithmetic.

Because here is what the word tax has been doing to you. It has been telling you that these hours are the ones you pay and the other hours are the ones you have, and so the majority of your waking life has been filed under expenditure. And nine years of that is a heavy thing to have quietly agreed to about yourself.

You are not paying for your life. You are in it. Scripture says whatever you do, do your work from the soul as for the Lord and not for people, and knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward. That is a promise about what a night at a bread plant is actually made of, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that real to a person rather than leaving it a nice idea for a Sunday.

Let me guard the other side too, because somebody will hear this wrong.

None of this means stay. If there is a better job and you can get it, go and get it. Paul says in the very same passage that if you can become free, take it. There is nothing holy about staying somewhere hard for the sake of it.

It only means that until the day you leave, you are not in a waiting room. You are somewhere. And the somewhere counts.

There was a man five hundred years ago who said the milkmaid at her stool and the cobbler at his bench were doing work as genuinely divine as anything happening in a pulpit, and that God milks the cows through the milkmaid. He was not being poetic. He meant the world is fed and clothed and kept warm by God, and He does it through people at their ordinary work, and He does not consider that a lower form of service.