My Body Still Wants the Night Shift

The clock on the stove says 1:14 and Marvin is standing in his own kitchen with the light off.

Six weeks since the last one. Twenty two years of nights before that, and everybody said the same thing at the party, said it kindly and meant it: you will sleep like a king now. His sister put it on the cake. Rest easy. And here he is at a quarter past one, wide awake, in a house so quiet he can hear the refrigerator cut in and out, holding a glass of water he does not want.

His thermos is still on the drainer. He washed it out of habit on the first Tuesday and has not put it away since, and neither has anybody else, which tells you something about that house.

He knows exactly what would be happening right now. Ten past one is when the line runs quiet enough to hear the ductwork. Quarter past, Purnell comes down from the far end with two coffees and no comment, which was the whole conversation and it was a good one. Two o'clock the pallets. Half three the slow hour where a man could go a little strange in his own head if he was not careful. Then the sky over the yard would start to go from black to that dirty gray, and there was nothing in this world like walking out of that building into the first light with the whole day laid out ahead of you like a field nobody had walked on yet.

He would not go back. Get that straight. The nights took his knees, took his stomach lining, took a decade of suppers and his daughter's whole seventh year, and he is not confused about any of it.

He misses it so badly he could put his fist through the wall.

That is the part he cannot say to anybody. He tried once, sideways, and his son in law laughed and said, you miss it, and Marvin said, no, I am just saying, and let it go. Because how do you say it. I am grateful. It nearly finished me. I want it back. Every one of those is true at the same time and there is no sentence in the English language that holds all three, so he says nothing and stands in the kitchen at 1:14 with a glass of water, and underneath it all runs the thing he really thinks, which is that a man who misses a place like that must not have wanted out of it as much as he claimed.

And you are the one at the counter.

Maybe not a plant. But something ended that you were right to come out of, and you know you were right, and there is an hour of the night when your body reaches for the old shape of things and finds nothing there. Nobody warned you about this part. They told you about the freedom. They did not tell you that the freedom would be shapeless at one in the morning, or that missing a thing that hurt you would arrive feeling like a betrayal.

Sit down at the table. There is something in the book about this and it is not what you are bracing for.

They said it out loud, and He fed them

Six weeks out of Egypt, in the wilderness, with the sea behind them and the bread run out, the people said something that got written down and kept.

Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.Exodus 16:3

Sit with what that sentence is, and notice that the Spirit of God saw to it that the sentence stayed in the book exactly as they said it. These are freed men. They watched the water stand up and let them through. And now they are saying, out loud, in front of God and everybody, that they want the meat pots back, and they are calling the place that broke their backs the place where they ate their fill.

Egypt did not have meat pots for slaves. But it had an order to it. It had an hour when the food came, and a man knew what every day was going to be, and standing in the open with nothing on the horizon does something to a person that a whip never did.

Here is the thing I want you to see, and it is God's own handling of it, written into Exodus 16 where anybody can read it, and the same Spirit who inspired that page is handling you the same way tonight: you were never required to be finished missing the old order before God started feeding you in the new one, and there is not a word of rebuke anywhere in what He says next.

Read what He does next. He does not scold them. He does not say, after everything I did for you. He does not take one thing back or make them qualify for anything.

Behold, I am about to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every dayExodus 16:4

Bread. That is the answer to the complaint. Not a lecture on gratitude, not a delay until the attitude improved, just bread on the ground in the morning, and enough of it, and again the next morning.

There is nothing in His word that turns a man's homesickness into treason, and the Holy Spirit is not treating yours that way either: you have a God who reads the longing for what it actually is, which is a body remembering an order it lived by for twenty two years, and He is not offended by it and never has been.

A day at a time is an order too

Now look at the shape of what He gave them, because this is the part that answers one in the morning.

He did not hand them a month's schedule. He gave them a rhythm they had to come out into the open for, every single morning, and it did not keep overnight, and it was there again the next day. That is an order. It is not the absence of one. It is just an order that runs on a hand instead of on a board by the time clock.

You have spent twenty two years inside a rhythm that was posted in advance, and the shapelessness of this new life is not proof that there is nothing holding it. It is what it feels like when the holding moves from a printed sheet to a Person. This is yours in the six weeks you are standing in, because Lamentations 3 says His mercies are new every morning, and the Holy Spirit is the one making a daily thing feel less like a void and more like a delivery.

I am not going to tell you the missing stops. I have no business making that kind of promise and I would not put a date on your body. What I will tell you is what the manna says about the missing: it says the ground is stocked in the morning whatever a man said in the kitchen at one o'clock, and it says the stocking never once waited on his mood to improve.

Plainly for a moment, and I would rather say it and not be needed. If the slow hour has gotten heavy in a way that scares you, if being awake and useless at one in the morning has started to turn into darker thoughts than that, tell one human being today, and reach the crisis line where you live if there is any danger to you at all. Say it to somebody who can sit in a kitchen with you. Freedom has never once meant handling the small hours alone.