The Yard Before the Shift Starts

He gets to the yard eleven minutes early, and he has been getting there eleven minutes early for nine years.

The engine goes off. The radio goes off with it. Through the windscreen the roller doors are half up, and there is a light on in the office where the supervisor's desk is, and a man he trained four years ago is sitting behind it drinking from the mug with the chipped handle.

They told him on a Thursday. They were kind about it. They used the word fit twice and the word direction once, and then they asked whether he had any questions, and he said no, because the only question he had was not one you can ask in a room with a laminated sign on the door.

That was three weeks ago. He has worked every shift since. He has done them properly, the way he always has, because doing them badly never once occurred to him and that is precisely the part that stings.

And every morning since, he has sat in this seat for the same eleven minutes, and something in his chest gets low and stays low, and he cannot decide whether he is angry or just tired.

That is your car park. That is your eleven minutes. And I want to reach you before ten to six, because something is being decided out here that the meeting on Thursday had no authority to decide.

Who actually hands out the wage

Let me say the true thing first, because it is the thing nobody said in that room.

You were not passed over because you were less. You may never find out why. Panels have their reasons and some of them are good and some of them are just the shape of a Thursday, and you are not going to get a full accounting of it in this life. Sitting in a car park trying to reverse engineer somebody else's decision is a way of handing them a job they never asked for and are not qualified to do, which is the job of telling you what you are worth.

So take this before the door.

You are already carrying your standing into that building. Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men, and then Paul says the part that changes a Monday: knowing that of the Lord ye shall receive the reward of the inheritance: for ye serve the Lord Christ. Read who the employer is in that sentence. Not the company. Not the panel. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a man at ten to six, and He is telling you that the work you did last week was received somewhere it was properly counted.

Now hear what that does to a job title.

A title is a description of a task. It is a useful thing, and there is nothing wrong with wanting one. But it was never a description of a person, and the moment it starts describing a person it has been asked to carry weight it was not built for. That is what happened to you on Thursday. They moved a task, and something in you heard them move a verdict.

You have a worth that was not on the agenda that day. The written word says you serve the Lord Christ, and serve there is the word for a bondservant in a great house, someone whose whole standing comes from whose house it is rather than from which room they were given. The Holy Spirit keeps that standing steady in a yard where the office light is on and somebody else is behind the desk.

And notice something about the last nine years, because it is evidence and you have been treating it as nothing.

You have gone in early for nine years when nobody was counting. You have done the job right on the mornings when doing it wrong would never have been traced back to you. That is not ambition. Ambition works when it is watched. What you have been doing works when it is not, and there is only one explanation for a man who is careful in the dark, which is that he is working for somebody who is in the dark with him.

You have been seen every one of those mornings. Of the Lord ye shall receive, says the written word, and of the Lord is where the receiving comes from and always was. The Holy Spirit has been the witness on every early shift you have ever worked. Nothing you did carefully has gone missing. It went somewhere.