I Work Evenings And I Think I Missed It

The evenings went to the work. That is just the arithmetic of it.

Five nights a week for a long time now, and the thing about evenings is that they are where all of this is supposed to happen. Everybody knows that. The table, the noise, the long light. That is the picture.

And you were somewhere else for it, wearing something with your name on it, doing a job that pays for the house the picture happens in.

So there is a conclusion you arrived at without noticing, and it goes like this: the years for that went past me.

Not bitterly. That is the thing about it. There is no bitterness in it at all, which is exactly why nobody has ever challenged it. It sits in a man like a settled fact, the way a man knows his own height.

And I want to challenge it, because it is not a fact. It is a reading, and it was done in poor light, and it uses a definition of family time that nobody who wrote Scripture would recognize.

Read the verse for what it does not say

There is a line in Deuteronomy that is the closest thing the Bible has to a schedule for a household.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. (Deuteronomy 6:7, King James Version)

Four moments are named there, and I want you to notice which one is missing.

Sitting in the house. Walking on the road. Lying down. Getting up.

There is no evening in it. There is no dinner table in it. There is no window of time between six and eight that the whole thing depends on.

You are a father inside a command that never once specified an evening, and the hours your work took have never been the only hours God named. Deuteronomy 6:7 lists sitting, walking, lying down and rising up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man on shifts that he has three of the four in his hands already.

Look at what the four actually are. They are not events. They are the ordinary postures of a day: at rest, in transit, going to sleep, waking up.

Which is to say the verse is describing a life rather than a slot.

You have three of those four sitting in your week untouched, and a man who works nights has never once been a man outside the instruction. It is written in Deuteronomy 6 that the talking happens when a person rises up, and the Spirit of God is the one who redeems the wrong end of a clock for a man who thought he had missed the only good end of it.

Rising up. That one is worth stopping on.

For a household with a person on shifts, the morning is frequently the one hour when the house holds still and everybody is in it. It is the hour a man on evenings actually owns. And it is named, explicitly, in the oldest instruction there is about a family talking to each other.

Nobody is grading the hour

You have an hour that belongs to you already, and a house that holds still at seven in the morning has never once been a lesser room than the same house at seven at night. The Holy Spirit is the one who hands a man an hour he had written off, and Deuteronomy 6:7 names the rising up out loud alongside the sitting down.

Now, there is a feeling underneath all of this that has to be dealt with, or the arithmetic will not stick.

The feeling is that morning time is a substitute. Second best. The thing you do because you cannot have the real one.

Nowhere in Deuteronomy 6 is any of the four moments ranked. They are listed flat, as the places where a life gets spoken into. Somebody added the ranking later, and the somebody was probably a man doing sums at midnight in a parked car.

You are not on a lesser version of anything, and an hour at the wrong end of the day has never once been a lesser hour to God. Scripture names rising up in the same breath as sitting in the house without grading either one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lifts the word substitute off a morning.

And take the second half of that verse, because it is even better for you.

When thou walkest by the way. That is the car. That is the ten minutes to the bus stop. That is anywhere two people happen to be moving in the same direction with nobody facing anybody, which is the exact condition under which a boy of fourteen says something he would never say across a table.

You already have that one. You have probably had it for years without counting it.

You have been given moments you have not been counting, and a man who thought he had nothing has never once been a man with nothing. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a father what was already in his hands, and it is written in Deuteronomy 6 that the talking belongs to the road as much as to the house.

Twenty minutes at whichever end

So here is the shape of the thing, and it is deliberately unimpressive.

Take the first twenty minutes when you and somebody else are both awake in the same house. Whichever end of the day that lands.

Put something on the table. Sit down. Twenty minutes, and then the day takes over. Two people in one room with a reason to be there is the entire event, and the thing on the table is only the excuse for it.

If that is at seven in the morning with the light still low outside and one of them half asleep, then that is the hour. It counts. It counts in exactly the same way the evening counts, and the verse that says so is older than every assumption you have made about this.

You are able to hold a table at half past six in the morning, and a household is never once required to gather at the hour a picture in your head says. Deuteronomy 6:7 names the rising up as one of the four, and the same Spirit who put it there is the one who gets a tired man out of a chair twenty minutes early.

And if it is at eleven at night when you get in and one of them is still up, that one is named too. When thou liest down. Take it.

The instruction is not built around a family with regular hours. It never was. It is built around the four times any person is a person, and a man on shifts has all four of them, just in a different order to everybody else.

You have not missed the years, and a decade of evenings at work has never once canceled a single sitting, walking, lying down or rising up. It is written in Deuteronomy 6 that these are the moments, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a father the count is wrong before he loses another year to bad arithmetic.