The Locker Room After a Shift Like That

The locker door has been sticking all year and it sticks again now, and she stands there and lets it, because if she pulls it the way it needs pulling she is going to say something.

Twelve hours. The elevator was out from ten so everything went the long way round. Bay four had an incident before she got to it and she was the one who cleaned it and nobody said anything about that at all. A relative shouted at her at half past two about something that was not hers and she said sorry twice, and she has been carrying the sorry around since like a stone in a shoe. Her cart lost a wheel. The machine ate her card at lunch and she did not eat.

And the woman at the next locker, who is lovely, who has three grandchildren and never has a bad word, pulls her coat down and says, "Ah well. We are blessed to have the work, aren't we."

She says it warmly. She means it. She is right about a lot of things and she may well be right about that one.

And the other woman stands there with her hand on a sticking locker door and looks for the word anywhere in the twelve hours she has just had and cannot find it. Not in the elevator being out. Not in bay four. Not in the shouting or the sorry or the card or the wheel.

She says, "Mm." That is what she says. And she gets her coat.

On the bus she does the thing she does, which is play the shift back looking for the part where it was blessed, and she cannot find it, and by the second stop she has stopped looking for it in the shift and started looking for it in herself, which is a much worse place to go looking and she knows it and she goes anyway.

If you have ever had somebody say that word over a day that took everything you had, you know the exact stretch of road that woman is on. Under the "mm" there is a sentence she has never once said out loud: if today was blessed, then I do not know what the word is for, and I am not sure it is for me.

That word is not a review of your shift

Let me say the low thing first, because you have been polite about it in that locker room for years and polite is not free.

The problem is not that the shift was hard. You have had hard shifts and gone home and slept. The problem is that a good word landed on a hard shift, and now the shift is doing a job it was never qualified for, which is telling you where you stand with God. Blessed, out in the world, means: look how it is going for you. So on a day when it went like today went, the word turns around and starts asking questions about you.

So here is the word as the Bible actually uses it, and I am giving you this one because it is about a sound and not about a day.

Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound: they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance.Psalm 89:15

Look at what is in there and what is not. A people. A sound they know. A light on a face. There is no shift in that verse. There is no report on how anybody's day went. It is about a sound God's people recognize, the trumpet that meant God has moved and the year has turned, and about a face that is lit up toward them while they walk.

That is the word. Blessed is God's favor resting on a person. It is His face turned toward you, His light on the road under your feet. It is not a summary of the last twelve hours. You are walking in the light of His face right now, coat half on, and the elevator being out from ten did not put one shadow across it. Psalm 89 puts the whole thing on His countenance rather than on the day, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse written about a nation and lays it, present tense, on one woman at a sticking locker.

Two words, one spelling. Favored, and comfortable. You have been handed the second one on a bus every night this year.

Know the sound, not make the sound

Now here is the clause that does the work, and it is small enough to miss.

Blessed is the people that KNOW the joyful sound.

Not the people who are making it. Not the people who feel like making it. Not the people who managed to make it today after a shift like that. The people who know it. Who would recognize it. Who have heard it before and could pick it out of any other noise in the building.

That is a completely different requirement, and it is one you meet. You know that sound. You have heard God be good to you before. You know what it sounds like when He moves, and the fact that you cannot hear it over a lift alarm at half past two does not unknow it.

You are one of the people who knows that sound, and knowing is the qualification the verse actually names. That is exactly what Psalm 89 says and no more than it says, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one keeping a sound in a person's ear on a day when nothing in the building is playing it.

I need to be plain about something else in that verse too, because this is where it gets misused. It says they shall walk in the light of His face. Walk. Not float. Not skip. Walking is what you do with a bad knee and a lost wheel and a stone in your shoe. The verse does not describe people having an easy time. It describes people going forward with a light on them.

You have a light on you that was not switched off at any point in that twelve hours, and you were walking under it the whole shift. The written word says the light is on His countenance and not on your circumstances, and His Spirit is the one who shines that in a person's actual corridor rather than only in a good room on a Sunday.

Two ditches, and one of them is more comfortable

Now let me set out both ditches, because on this road there are two and you can go into either one from the same bus seat.

The first ditch says: nothing about today looked blessed, so favor must have gone elsewhere, and probably to someone who deserved it more. That is the ditch you were heading into by the second stop. It is a lie and it is doing harm.

The second ditch says: today was secretly the blessing, the incident and the shouting and the missed lunch were God's gift, and you just need to see it right. That one sounds holier. It is worse. Nobody sent you bay four. Nobody sent you a relative at half past two. The shift was a shift and God is not the author of what it took out of you.

Hold both halves. Your hard day is not the absence of His favor and it is not the favor in disguise.

You have His favor on you and you had a rotten day, and both of those are true in the same locker room. Scripture puts a blessed people and a long walk in the same sentence without softening either one, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible to hold two true things at once when you are too tired to hold anything.

And I am not going to tell you what tomorrow's shift is like. I have no idea. Nobody who tells you they do is telling you the truth. What I can tell you is what is written, and what is written is whose face is turned toward you while you walk out of that building.