Night Shift, and the Lord Was With Him

Three in the morning and the building is doing the thing empty buildings do, which is make small noises that are all explainable and none of them comforting.

He walks the second floor because walking it is the job. Glass on one side, offices on the other, and every fourteen paces there is his own reflection coming toward him with a flashlight and a lanyard.

Four years.

He took this as a stopgap. That is not a story he tells himself, it is a fact with a date on it: he took it in the October after everything went the way it went, because it was money and it was nights and nights meant he could be at home in the day when the children were small. Both of those reasons stopped applying about two and a half years ago and he is still here.

There is a woman at his church who prays over him at the end of the meeting sometimes, and she says the same thing every time, with her hand not quite touching his shoulder, and she means every word of it: "There is favor on your life."

Favor.

He looks down the corridor. There is a plant on a filing cabinet that somebody has stopped watering. There is a printer with a light on. There is a fire door and then another fire door and then the stairs, and then he does it all again on the third floor, and then the first, and then he does the second floor again at four.

He is not angry with her. He would defend her to anybody. But there is a specific feeling that arrives at about three in the morning and it is the feeling of a word that will not attach to anything he can see.

If you have ever had that word said over you in a room and then gone to work in a place where it does not seem to apply, you know that corridor. And you know the sentence underneath: if that is favor, it is very quiet about it, and I have been walking this floor for four years waiting for it to say something.

What the word is actually describing

Let me walk with you and say the plain thing first, because it has been walking with you a while.

The problem is not the night shift. You have done hard work before. The problem is that a good word has been attached to your life and it appears, from the second floor at three in the morning, to be false. And when a word about God turns out to be false about your life, you do not conclude that the word is wrong. You conclude something about yourself. That is what has been happening slowly for about two years.

So let me give the word back, plainly, before we go anywhere else.

Blessed does not mean things are going well. It means the favor of God is resting on a person. His face is turned toward them. That is what the word means everywhere in the Bible and it has never once meant comfortable, and it certainly has never meant promoted.

Now let me show you where Scripture actually puts favor, because it is not where the office is.

But the Lord was with Joseph, and shewed him mercy, and gave him favour in the sight of the keeper of the prison.Genesis 39:21

Read where that sentence is standing. It is in a prison. Joseph has just done the most upright thing in the entire story, refused a thing that would have been easy to accept, and been jailed for it on a lie, and the very next verse says the Lord was with him and gave him favor.

Not: got him out. Not: cleared his name. The favor is INSIDE the wrong place, and the text is completely unembarrassed about that.

You have the favor of God resting on you on this floor, at three in the morning, and the corridor is not a comment on it. Genesis 39:21 puts favor and a prison in one sentence without apologizing for either, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about a man in a cell and lays it on a man with a lanyard.

Where the favor showed up, exactly

Now let me show you what the favor actually did for Joseph, because it is not what people assume.

It did not shorten the sentence. He is in that prison for years. It did not restore his position. It did not get word to his father, who spends the whole time believing his son is dead.

What it did was this: the keeper of the prison trusted him. He was given responsibility for other prisoners. He noticed two men looking downcast one morning and asked them why, which is a small thing and is also the hinge the entire rest of the book turns on.

The favor showed up as: he was trusted where he was, and he was awake to the person next to him.

Which is not a promotion. It is a quality of presence in a place he did not choose.

You have been trusted with something in a building nobody thinks about, and being trusted where you are is what favor has looked like before. Genesis 39 shows the favor operating inside the prison rather than against it, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who makes a person noticing and steady in a place, which is the same thing showing up in a different century.

And think about what you actually do on that floor. You check on the woman on the seventh who works late twice a week and you have never once made a thing of it. You know which cleaner has a sick husband. You found the man from the fourth floor sitting in the stairwell in February and you sat with him for twenty minutes and never told anybody, and he still says something to you every time he sees you.

Nobody would put any of that on a list of blessings. It is exactly the list Genesis puts on Joseph.

You are awake to the people in a building where everybody else is asleep, and that is not a small thing being done with a large life. Scripture records Joseph noticing two faces in a prison as the turn of the whole account, and it is His Spirit who is named as the one giving discernment about people, so what you have been doing on nights has an author.

What I will not tell you about the four years

Now the honest part, because you have had four years of people being confident at you.

I am not going to tell you that this is a season with an end date you cannot see. I do not know that. I do not know whether you are here for another year or another decade and neither does anybody at that meeting, however warmly they say it.

And I am not going to tell you that the four years were sent to build something in you. That is the comfortable ditch and it turns a man's life into a curriculum. Nobody arranged your October. What happened to you happened, and God is not the author of it.

Both halves. The four years are not the absence of His favor, and they are not the favor in disguise.

You are favored and you are on nights, and both of those are true in this corridor at the same time. The written word puts the favor and the prison in one verse without resolving the tension, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a man able to hold both without needing one of them to be false.

What is written is where the favor was in Joseph's story, and it was with him the whole way through, including the part nobody would have called blessed at the time.