The Script Loads Before You Do

The headset goes on last, and there is a reason for that.

She sits down at four minutes past eight at whichever desk is free, because they hot-desk now, and the chair is always at somebody else's height. She logs in. The screen thinks. Then the script loads, the same fourteen panels it has loaded every morning for three years, and the greeting sits at the top in bold with her name slot already filled in.

She reads it perfectly. She has read it nine hundred times this month and she reads it warmly, because she is a warm person, and the customers hear a kind woman on the end of a line, which they should, because that is exactly what she is.

And somewhere around the fourth call, on a bad morning, a small strange thought arrives and sits down beside her.

Nobody here has heard my actual voice.

Not the customers, who get the greeting. Not the floor, where you are a login and an average handling time. Not the screen, which fills in her name automatically as though it knows it. Three years of saying words she did not write, in a chair somebody else adjusted, and a quiet worry underneath it that a person could disappear inside a job like this and nobody would notice the moment it happened.

That is your desk. That is your fourth call. And I want to get to you before the headset goes on, because something is true about you at four minutes past eight that no login has ever been able to see.

Somebody has already heard the real voice

Let me put something enormous underneath that desk, because the psalm I want was written by a man who had the same worry and better reason for it.

David spent years being known publicly as a category. The shepherd boy. The giant killer. The one the women sang about. Everybody around him had a version of him that they had made, and every one of those versions was smaller than the man. And out of that, he writes the sentence that ends the fear of disappearing inside a role.

O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.Psalm 139:1-3

Look at the verbs, because they are not the verbs of an audit. Searched. Known. Understandest. Art acquainted with. Acquainted is a warm, unhurried, long-standing word. It is the word for somebody who knows your habits because they have been around you for years and were interested the whole time.

You are searched and known already, at four minutes past eight. Before the login goes through, before the script loads, before one customer hears one word of somebody else's greeting. The written word says the knowing is finished business, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a present fact in a woman in a hot-desk chair rather than a nice line in a psalm.

Now hear what that does to the thing you are afraid of.

You are afraid of disappearing inside the job. But disappearing requires somebody to stop being able to find you, and the psalm has already gone looking in every direction a person can go and reported back that there is nowhere you are not already located. Your downsitting is in there. So is your uprising. So is the fourth call on a bad morning.

You have never once been an average handling time to God. The written word says He understands your thought afar off, before it has arrived and before it has become a sentence you could say to anybody. The Holy Spirit reads at that level, underneath the greeting, underneath the fourteen panels. He has been listening to the voice you have not used at work in three years.

And I want to say something about the warmth you put into the script, because you have been treating it as nothing and it is not nothing.

The words are not yours. The kindness is. Anybody can read fourteen panels. You have been quietly deciding, nine hundred times a month, to say them like a person who cares about whoever is on the other end, and that decision is invisible to the system and completely visible to God. It never appeared in a report. It appeared somewhere better.

You have been seen doing something generous all day, every day. Thou compassest my path, says the psalm, and compass means to encircle, to go all the way round: there is no angle of your shift He is looking at from the outside. The Holy Spirit has been inside every one of those calls with you.