The Rota Went Up Without Me

Nine at night, on the stairwell landing outside his flat, because that is where the signal is. The app takes a moment to think about it. He waits with his thumb over the screen the way a man waits over a light switch in a room he already knows is dark.

Next week: Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday. Three where there were five.

No message came. No name at the bottom of anything. The rota went up, and his was shorter, and nobody thought to say so first. He stands there working out that the not being told is the part that has actually gone through him, more than the arithmetic has.

He is thirty-eight. He is quick on the pick rate and he has never once been spoken to about his work. He knows six other lads on the same contract and every one of them checks that app on a stairwell somewhere.

He goes back in. Kettle on. Telly down low so the flat is not silent.

And here is the other thing that is true on the same landing, at the same minute. He prayed about this in the van park on Monday, out loud, with the window up. He has prayed about it for four winters now. He is not a man with a thin faith or a lazy one. He was there on Sunday and he sang and he meant every word of it.

Two true things standing on the same landing, and nobody has ever taught him how to hold both at once.

Over the door of the page somebody sent him it says faith over poverty. He looks at that for a second and he thinks: well. My faith is standing. My hours are cut.

And that is roughly where you are, friend, or you would not have opened this. So let us be honest about the name on the sign before we take another step.

Faith is not the lever on that rota

Faith over poverty does not mean faith removes poverty. It never has meant that. If somebody told you it did, they told you something the Bible does not say, and it has cost you four winters of quietly wondering what is wrong with you.

So let me turn and say this straight to you, because it is the thing that has gone unnamed the longest. Your standing with God is not on that app. You have a place with Him that was never issued by a shift pattern and cannot be shortened by one, and I am not handing you my own opinion about that: the written word puts Paul in hunger and in short supply and calls him an apostle of Jesus Christ on the same page, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept both of those sentences standing in the record so that no believer in any century would have to pick one of them.

Because it is not really the hours. It is the second thing that grows underneath the hours: the suspicion that a proper believer, a real one, would not still be checking an app on a landing at nine at night. That somewhere there is a key nobody ever handed you. That other men pray and things move, and you pray and the rota goes up shorter.

That suspicion is a lie and I am not going to spend one sentence being gentle with it. You are held tonight by a God who has never once run a mark scheme on anybody's hours. Scripture puts the rain on the just and on the unjust with no arithmetic in between (Matthew 5:45), and His Spirit is the one who keeps that true on the evenings you cannot feel a thing about it.

We are troubled on every side, yet not distressed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.2 Corinthians 4:8 and 9

Look at what that man does and does not do there. He does not tell you the pressure is imaginary. Troubled on every side is the whole compass, and he names it before he says anything else. Then he tells you what all that pressure did not manage to accomplish, and the list is the important half: not crushed, not in despair, not abandoned, not finished.

Nothing in those two verses moved. The pressure is still on every side in the last clause exactly as it was in the first. What is being reported is a man still standing inside it, and the word of God thought that worth writing down.

So what is your faith actually doing at nine at night

Not putting hours back on that app. Let us have that said plainly, and then let us look at what it is doing, because it is not nothing and it has been badly undervalued on that landing for four winters.

Your faith is the reason you prayed in the van park with the window up. It is the reason you went back in and put the kettle on instead of concluding that God is a fiction, which would honestly be the simpler position from where you are standing. You have endured, and endurance is the written word's own name for it (James 1:12) rather than a soft word I reached for, and the Spirit who has been holding you up in it is not standing behind you grading the grip.

Hear this, because nobody at that depot is ever going to say it to you. You are a man who has kept his hands on God through a stretch that has loosened the grip of people with far easier lives. The Holy Spirit is the witness to that inside you on the evenings when you feel nothing whatsoever (Romans 8:16), and a witness is not the same thing as a feeling.

And nobody, me included, gets to tell you that this is about to be rewarded with a longer week. That is a promise no one was ever authorized to make, and I am not going to make it to get a warmer ending out of this page.

Poverty does not get the last word about you

Here is what the name over this door actually claims, and it claims it honestly.

Poverty does not get to defeat your faith. It does not get to decide what you are worth. It does not get to be the final sentence about your life, because there is a longer document than a shift pattern and it is the written word of God.

You were bought at a price that had nothing to do with your earnings, and what you are worth was settled somewhere else entirely and by Somebody else entirely (1 Corinthians 6:20). That is finished work and it is not in review. The Holy Spirit bears witness to it in you on the mornings when the flat is quiet and there is nothing on the app at all.

And if this has come to the point of danger, of a home lost or a family going without food, then reach for real help today and reach for it with no shame on you anywhere. That is not a lack of faith. Faith has hands, and this is exactly what they are for.