Two Jobs and No Bottom

The second shift starts at six and you are usually in the car by twenty to, and there is a stretch of about four minutes on the ring road where nobody needs anything from you.

That is the only part of the day that is yours. Four minutes and a radio you do not turn on.

Five years. You picked up the second job as a bridge. That was the word you used to your sister and you believed it. Six months, a year at the outside, get the head above the water and then drop back to one.

Five years.

The numbers move. That is the part that nobody outside it understands. They do move, every month, in the right direction. It is just that the distance does not appear to change, the way a mountain does not appear to change however long you drive toward it, and there is a particular kind of tired that comes from moving steadily toward a thing that stays the same size.

Your sister stopped asking in the third year. She was not being unkind. There was nothing new to report, and after a while a person stops asking a question that only ever gets the same answer.

So you do the shift, and you drive home, and you sit in the car outside the house for a minute before you go in, because going in means being needed again and you are not ready yet.

The verse says through, and it says with

There is a promise in Isaiah that is precise in a way people miss.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee.Isaiah 43:2

Read the prepositions, because they are the whole sermon.

Through. Not around. Not instead of. God does not say there will be no water; He says when you pass through it. The water is assumed. The fire is assumed. He is not offering a route that avoids either.

With. That is what He offers instead, and it is offered in the present tense, in the middle of the water rather than on the far bank.

You are not outside this promise because you are still in the water. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, Isaiah 43:2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes with into something a woman can feel on a ring road at twenty to six.

I am not going to explain five years

I will not, and I want to say why so you can put down anything anybody else has handed you.

Nobody knows why this stretch has been this long. Anyone who tells you fast is soothing themselves. And the ones who arrive with a lesson in it have almost always never worked a second shift in their lives.

So: not a season with a purpose you have to accept. Not discipline. Not a refining you are somewhere in the middle of. Scripture is willing to leave a long hard stretch unexplained and stay in it, Psalm 88:9, and the Holy Spirit does not need you to have understood a thing before He is willing to be in a car with you.

You are not being taught something by this. You are working two jobs, in the fifth year, and God is on the ring road.

Nothing here is advice

Not one word of this page is about your money.

I do not know your situation and I am not going to suggest a system, an app, a plan or a conversation with anybody. You have run these numbers more times than anybody alive and a stranger offering you a strategy would be an insult wearing a helpful face.

And nothing here costs anything, and nothing here ever will. There is no toll booth in front of your breakthrough. Scripture never put a price on receiving from God, Isaiah 55:1, and the Holy Spirit does not deal through a turnstile.

You have not been left to carry this by yourself. Scripture says cast thy burden upon the Lord, and He shall sustain thee, Psalm 55:22, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes sustaining something more than a nice word about God in general.

What five years does to a woman's name for herself

Here is the damage, and it is not in the account.

Somewhere in the third year, the arrangement stopped being a thing you are doing and became a thing you are. You are the woman who works two jobs. That is how the family describes you, kindly, and it is how you describe yourself, and it has quietly become your whole name.

It is not your name. Scripture gave you a different one, Isaiah 43:1, and the Holy Spirit has been using that one the whole time.

You are a woman who sings, who used to be funny at parties, who reads if she gets the chance, who is the one everybody rings when there is bad news because you are steady. Two jobs is a schedule. It is not an identity, and five years of a schedule does not get to become a person.

You are not what your rota says you are. Scripture says thou art precious in my sight, and honorable, and I have loved thee, Isaiah 43:4, and the Holy Spirit says that over a woman sitting in a parked car outside her own front door.

That verse is two lines after the water and the fire. He puts it right there on purpose.