Four Shifts and No Answer

The rota goes up on a Thursday at about four, and you know it is up because everybody's phones do the same thing at the same time.

Sixteen hours. That was the arrangement, more or less, for two years. Not contracted, because nothing is contracted, but sixteen was what it was and everybody knew it was what it was.

Then in March it was twelve. In April it was eight. Since the last week of May it has been four, every week, without one word from anybody about why.

You have asked three times. Once at the counter, which was the wrong place and you knew that while you were doing it. Once by message, which got a thumbs up and nothing else. Once properly, standing in the doorway of the office, and he said there had been a change in the way they are doing things and that it would settle down.

That was eleven weeks ago.

You are not being sacked. That is the strange part. If you were being sacked there would be a conversation and a date and a form, and it would be awful and it would be finished.

Instead there is a rota that goes up on Thursday at four, and a number on it, and a silence with no edges to it at all.

The psalm is about people nobody answers

There is a line in Psalm 10 that arrives at the end of a long complaint about people who are ignored.

LORD, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thine ear to hear.Psalm 10:17

Read the whole psalm sometime. It is about the poor being caught in schemes they cannot see the shape of, and about a person crying out and getting nothing back, and about somebody saying in their heart that God has forgotten.

And then this. Thou hast heard. Past tense. Already done.

The psalm does not report that the situation changed. It reports that God heard, and that He is the one who prepares the heart, and that His ear is caused to hear, which is a strange way of saying it and worth noticing: God arranges His own attention toward the person nobody is answering.

You have been heard already, in a way nobody at that counter has managed. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says Lord, Thou hast heard the desire of the humble, Psalm 10:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a Thursday afternoon at four.

Nothing here is advice

Not one word of this is about your employment.

I do not know your workplace, your manager, or what is actually happening in that business. Nobody who has not stood in that doorway has any business suggesting how you should have asked, and there is a particular unkindness in implying that a better approach would have got you a straight answer.

So nothing here about what to say, who to escalate to, or what you might be entitled to. Nothing here reads eleven weeks of silence as a report on your effort. Scripture never reads a shut door that way, Psalm 10:14, and the Holy Spirit is not the voice telling you that you asked badly.

You have not been overlooked by God since March. That was as true at sixteen hours as it is at four.

What silence does that a no does not

Here is the thing worth naming, because it is doing more damage than the hours.

A refusal can be absorbed. It is information. It has a shape and you can put it down somewhere and stop carrying it.

A silence has no shape, so the mind supplies one, and the shape it supplies is almost always about you. He is avoiding it because of something you did. They have decided something and nobody wants to say it. You are being managed out slowly so that nobody has to have a conversation.

You do not know any of that. It may be entirely about a budget you will never see. Scripture never asked anybody to arbitrate a silence, Psalm 10:14, and the Holy Spirit has not been the one supplying the shape.

But eleven weeks of no information is eleven weeks of a mind filling a hole, and the filling is what is exhausting you rather than the number on the rota.

You are not what an unanswered question has been implying. Scripture says the Lord seeth it, for He beholdeth mischief and spite, to requite it with His hand, Psalm 10:14, and the Holy Spirit does not leave a person's worth to be settled by whoever declines to reply.

The dignity of the four

And there is the other half, which is easy to miss.

You still go in. Four hours a week, and you do the four hours properly, and you have not let the standard drop, and nobody has thanked you for that and nobody is going to.

That is not nothing. That is a person keeping their own house in order while somebody else fails to keep theirs, and Scripture keeps a record of exactly that, Colossians 3:23, and the Holy Spirit has been in every hour of it.

You have kept faith in a place where nobody kept it with you. Scripture says let us not be weary in well doing, Galatians 6:9, and the Holy Spirit has been in those four hours every week whether or not one manager noticed a single one of them.