Three Layoffs and a Parking Lot

Ten minutes. He works it out on the way in, every time, and parks so he has exactly ten. Long enough to get his face right. Not so long that he starts thinking.

Fourth first day in four years. The first one was a restructure, which is a word he had never had a personal relationship with before. The second was the whole site closing, which at least made sense and at least happened to everybody at once. The third was six people out of forty and he still does not know why he was one of the six, and there is a version of that question he has stopped asking out loud because his wife has heard it enough.

He is forty-eight. He is good at the work. He has never been fired for cause in his life and he could say that sentence to anybody and it would be true, and it does not help as much as it should. Because what four years like that does to a man is not mainly financial and it is not mainly about pride. It is that a certain confidence has quietly gone out of him. He used to walk into a building assuming he would still be walking into it in five years. He does not assume that any more, and he cannot make himself.

Anybody who has been let go more than once knows this particular ten minutes. It does not have to be a warehouse. It is any morning where you have to put on a face and go and be new somewhere again. I am not going to tell anybody that this one holds. I do not know whether it holds and nobody who tells you otherwise knows either. What I want to do is talk to the man in the truck.

What the psalm asks a man to do while the chariots are still there

Let me put a line in front of us, and I want to be honest about what it does not say.

Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God.Psalm 20:7

Read it slowly. It does not say the chariots go away. It does not say the chariots were never any good. Chariots were, at the time, the most reliable thing a man could put his weight on: expensive, effective, visible from a long way off, the ancient equivalent of a solid job at a solid company with your name on a locker.

What the psalm says is that some people put their footing there, and that we remember a Name instead. Not in addition to a guarantee. Instead of a chariot. And the choice is being made on a battlefield with the chariots in plain sight and the outcome unknown.

You are steady, and it is a Name you are standing on rather than a position that keeps getting restructured. That is not something warm I am adding on top of four hard years. It is what is written in Psalm 20, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and puts it into a man in a parked truck ten minutes before a shift. The job is a chariot. You are not a chariot.

And notice the verb. Remember. It is not acquire and it is not achieve. The thing the psalm asks for is the recollection of something already true, which means the footing was there through all three layoffs and the work now is to call it back to mind.

You have had that ground under you through every one of those four years, including the days you could not feel it. Psalm 20 is the text this sits on, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old battlefield song land in a gravel lot in the morning.

The confidence that went, and what it actually was

Now the tender part, and I want to be careful with it, because a man in a truck can smell a pep talk at forty yards.

The confidence that left is real and its leaving was not a spiritual failure. A body learns from evidence. Three times in four years is evidence. What happened is that a man built a reasonable expectation on a reasonable foundation and the foundation moved three times, and now his weight goes down more carefully. That is not weakness. That is a person who has been paying attention.

But I want to name what that confidence was actually resting on, gently, because it matters. It was resting on continuity: on the idea that if a man is good and shows up, the arrangement continues. And that idea is not wicked, it is just not load bearing, and four years have proved it.

Every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand.Matthew 7:26

I want to be very clear about how I am not using that verse. It is not an accusation. Nobody in this story is a fool for having expected a job to last. The point is only what Jesus is contrasting: two houses, the same storm, and a difference that is invisible until the weather comes. He does not promise the storm stays away from the wise man. He promises the house stands.

You were built on the rock long before any of this, and the last four years have been the storm rather than the verdict. Matthew 7 puts the difference in the foundation and not in the weather, and it is the Spirit who moves that from a page into a chest.

You are still standing right now, and standing is what the passage says a house on rock does when the rain comes down. The written word describes the house that does not fall, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true in a man who has been talked out of expecting anything.

If any of these mornings 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 plain truth about the last four years. Being established by God has never been a reason for a man to sit alone in a truck with something that needs a person in the room.