Two Years Of Shifts I Cannot Recall

Two years without missing a day, and he could not describe one of those days to you.

The foreman said it at the Christmas thing. Raised a glass and said it warmly, in front of everybody: this man has not missed a shift in two years. Not one. Through everything. And people banged the table because that is what you do, and somebody said good lad, and he did the face and drank his drink.

Everything is his wife. She died in the February before last and he was back at work on the Monday because being at home was not survivable, and then there was another Monday, and then it was two years.

He knows the route. He knows his hands do the job. He has watched himself, from a slight distance, tighten a fitting correctly a hundred thousand times. What he does not have is any of it. Two years of a working life and it is one long undifferentiated gray, and if you asked him what happened last April he would have to check his phone.

He is not proud of the record. The record frightens him a bit, because a man who has been somewhere for two years and cannot remember being there has to wonder where he actually was.

You know this shape. Some long haul you completed, on paper, faultlessly, and no memory of doing it, and a room full of people raising a glass to a man who was not present.

Say what two years took, before the toast

The foreman did not count it, so let us.

It took two years. Not two years of grief, which he expected, but two years of memory, which nobody warned him about. It took his friendship with a man he has worked next to since he was twenty two, because that friendship ran on talking and he stopped. It took Sundays. It took the ordinary experience of arriving home and being somewhere rather than simply not at work.

And it has quietly taken the funeral itself, because he cannot get near it, and the not getting near it is doing something to him that he does not have a word for.

You have been showing up for two years in a body that went on without you, and God has never once graded a single one of those days. Psalm 34:18 says He is near to the broken hearted and saves such as are of a contrite spirit, and it is His Spirit who takes near off a page and puts it in a workshop doorway at half past six. He was not at the Christmas thing admiring the record. He was in the gray.

When the heart fails, and something else is the strength

There is one line built for a man who was not there.

My flesh and my heart fails: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

Read the first half properly, because most people rush past it to get to the comfort. My flesh and my heart fails. That is not hypothetical and it is not partial. The writer says the thing gave out, and Scripture leaves it in.

And then, in the same sentence, without a therefore and without an explanation, God is the strength of that failed heart. Not the strength that stopped it failing. The strength of a heart that failed, which is a completely different sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that difference land on a man in a doorway rather than sit there as a nice piece of Hebrew.

You were strengthened as a man whose heart had already given out, and the strength was never a repair of you. That is not sympathy with a verse attached. The written word admits the failure outright and puts God in the same clause, and the Spirit is the one who has been driving a van to a job every morning for two years. The foreman said dependable. Psalm 73 does not say dependable about anybody.

And this needs saying plainly. Her death is not a display. It was not arranged so a workshop could learn something about endurance from watching a man clock in. God did not take her in February to make a point at a Christmas do. She was not a lesson and you are not an exhibit.

Two things a man in the gray has to hear

The first is that God still holds people who are not present to it. Not held, poetically, in an older world. Holds, present tense, at six in the morning, in a van, with the radio off.

The second is that the holding was not a response to how he was handling it. He was not handling it. He was working, which is a different thing and which nobody at that table can tell apart.

You were kept through two years you were not really in, and being kept did not depend on your knowing about it. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes both alike into a fact about a specific gray stretch rather than a general truth about God.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the gray has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you tell anybody at work. That is not weakness after two strong years. That is God sending help with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.