A Different Unit Every Eight Weeks

Eight weeks and out. That is the shape of it, and she has done nine of them now, which is a year and a half of arriving somewhere and finding the supply closet.

She is very good at the arriving. That is the strange competence this work builds. By the end of the first shift she knows where the linen is, which of the pumps is temperamental, who to ask when the system does not accept the order, and who is having a bad month and should be handled gently. By the end of week two she is genuinely useful. By week six she is the person other people come to. And then it is week eight, and there is a card signed by twelve people, half of whom spelled her name right, and then it is a different state.

Nobody is unkind. Everybody is warm. That is the part she cannot explain to people outside the work, because when she tries to describe it they think she means the staff are cold, and they are not. They are lovely. It is that warmth is not the same as belonging, and she has had nine assignments of warmth.

Here is what she noticed in the parking garage after her seventh contract ended, sitting in the car with the engine off. She has become somebody who is competent everywhere and known nowhere, and the competence is what makes it invisible, because a person who is that good at arriving does not look like a person who needs anything. Anyone who has been the temp, the locum, the contractor, the substitute knows exactly what that garage felt like. I have no word about the tenth assignment. What I have is a word about the woman in the car.

Proverbs calls a person a foundation

I want to put a short line down and then say something about its grammar, because the grammar is doing the work.

As the whirlwind passeth, so is the wicked no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.Proverbs 10:25

Read the second half again slowly. The righteous is an everlasting foundation. Not stands on one. Is one. Hebrew poetry does that on purpose: it puts a person in the grammatical position you would expect a building to occupy, and the effect is deliberate. The permanent thing in that verse is a human being who belongs to God.

Now put that next to eight weeks. The contract is the whirlwind. It comes, it does its thing, it passes. And the person walking through it is the part the proverb calls everlasting, which is exactly backward from how it feels in a parking garage.

You are a foundation, and the proverb makes that a fact about you rather than about your placement. That is not a compliment I am handing out. It is what is written in Proverbs 10, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and sets it into a person at shift change. The assignment is eight weeks. You are not eight weeks.

And there is something worth noticing about the word everlasting sitting in a book of practical sayings. Proverbs is not usually reaching for eternity. It is mostly about ants and gossip and getting up in the morning. It reaches for that word once, here, and puts it on a person.

You have a permanence that Scripture assigns to you directly, and no unit anywhere has ever been in a position to grant it or take it. Proverbs 10:25 is where the word puts it, and it is the Spirit of God who moves it off a page and into a body at seven in the morning.

Competence is not the same as belonging

Now let me go at the real thing, because I think it has never been named to her and naming it is most of the work.

She is excellent at the work, and the excellence is genuine, and it has also become a place to live. When a person is that capable, nobody asks how she is, because capable people do not look like they need asking. So the competence, which is a good thing, has quietly become the reason she is unknown, and that is a loop with no exit inside it.

I want to say clearly: the competence is not the problem and I am not going to ask anybody to be less good at their work. What I am going to do is take the weight off it. Because competence has been carrying something it was never built to carry, which is the answer to the question do I belong here.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Paul writes that to people who had every reason to feel like guests. And look at what he says they are not: not strangers, not foreigners, which are both words about legal standing in a place. He replaces those with citizen and household, and the household is God's rather than any building's.

You were made a member of a household, and the membership was not issued by a hospital, a state or an agency. Ephesians 2:19 is where that stands, and it is His Spirit who makes an old letter land in a break room.

You are known, fully and by name, in the only place where knowing lasts longer than eight weeks. It is written that the Lord knows those who are His (2 Timothy 2:19), and it is the Holy Spirit who presses that into a woman who has been the new person nine times in eighteen months.

If any of these weeks ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the truth about the drives home. Being an everlasting foundation has never been a reason to carry something alone that needs a real person in the room.