The Thing I Stopped Doing at Break

It was about four seconds and he never made anything of it.

Lunch out of the tin, sit down, and before the first bite he would go still for a moment. Head not really bowed. Eyes not really closed. Four seconds of thank You that he had been doing since he was nineteen because his grandad did it, and half the time he was thinking about the football by the end of it.

Somebody noticed in about January. Nothing nasty. Started counting them out loud, mock reverent, and one, and two, and three, and everybody laughed, including him, and it became a thing, and for a while it was genuinely quite funny.

He stopped some time in March. Not a decision. He just started eating straight away.

And here is the part that has stayed with him: nobody noticed that either. The joke died on its own because there was nothing to hang it on. Not one person in that break room has thought about it since.

He has. He thinks about it most days. Because he cannot decide whether what happened was that a small habit fell away, or that he was mocked out of something and folded, and the second version has been sitting on him for months.

That is your break room. That is your four seconds. And I want to take that apart, because there is a promise about shame and it is worded as a fact rather than a hope.

Not ashamed is stated, not requested

Paul quotes Isaiah in the middle of an argument, and he quotes the clause about shame on purpose.

For the scripture saith, Whosoever believeth on him shall not be ashamed.Romans 10:11

Shall not be ashamed.

That is not advice. It is not try not to be. It is a flat statement about what is the case for the person who believes on Him, made in the future indicative, covering all of it, and the word underneath it carries the sense of being publicly disgraced, shown up, put to open shame.

And notice the whosoever. There is no clause in it about how well you have carried yourself in a break room.

You are not standing in disgrace. Not in that room, not in March, not now. The written word states your freedom from shame rather than offering it as a target, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man who has been quietly grading himself since the spring.

Now let me say something about the man who started counting, because months of this have begun to give him a role he never auditioned for.

He was being funny about a mannerism. He was not attacking God and he was not attacking you; he does the same to the bloke who always taps the doorframe on the way out. He would be genuinely startled to learn any of this happened.

You have nobody to stand against in that room. The written word does not make your peace a thing you win off somebody else. The Holy Spirit is fond of the man who counted, and there is no side of that table He is standing on.

And now the real question, the one you have been circling since March.

Whether you folded.

Here is the honest answer, and it is smaller than you fear: you do not know, and you will not know, and the reason is that a habit which fades under mild teasing was never load-bearing. The four seconds were never what held you. They were a nice thing your grandad left you.

You are held by Him and not by a routine. Whosoever believeth on him, and the believing is where the whole promise attaches. The Holy Spirit has been at that table every lunchtime since March, in the four seconds and in the absence of them alike.