Line Six, Second Shift

Second shift starts at three and the line does not stop until eleven, and in between there are two breaks and one of them is fifteen minutes.

Nine years on line six. His hands do eleven motions and they do them in the same order about four hundred times a night, and they have not needed him for at least six of those years. He is good. He has never been written up. The younger guys ask him things.

And the part of him that thinks has nothing at all to do for eight hours.

That is the situation, and if you have never worked a line you may not understand what it actually means. It does not mean boredom. Boredom is when you have nothing to do and could do something. This is different. He cannot stop. He cannot step out. If he steps out, six people downstream of him stop too, and there is a whole system built on the assumption that the man on six is where he is supposed to be.

So when something surfaces, he is standing in it, and he stays standing in it, and there is no available action of any kind.

We are not going to describe it and I am not going to ask you what yours is. It surfaces, sideways and complete, at maybe half past six on a Tuesday with four and a half hours to go. His hands keep doing the eleven motions. His face does the thing a face does on a line, which is nothing at all.

And here is the belief that has grown up in him over nine years of that, and he has never once said it out loud.

If I cannot fight it, then I must be agreeing with it.

That is what the last nine years have quietly taught him. A man who could walk away and does not walk away is choosing. And since he cannot walk away, and since it goes on and on and he does nothing, some part of him has concluded that not-reacting is consent, and that therefore he has been consenting, four hundred motions a night, for years.

And you know that line. Something arrives that you did not choose, and you are somewhere you cannot leave, and the not-being-able-to-leave gets read as a confession.

So take this in before we go one step further, because you have four hours left tonight. You are not agreeing to anything and you never have been. Psalm 139:12 says the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, which means He is not reading your inside by what shows on your face, and the Holy Spirit is standing at line six with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

Aim, not clearance

There is an instruction in Colossians that gets read as though it were about achieving a mental state, and read properly it is about something a man can actually do while his hands are moving.

Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.Colossians 3:2

Set your affection. The word behind it is about what you are oriented toward, what you have your mind aimed at. It is a direction word.

It is not a clearance word. There is nothing in that sentence about emptying anything out. Paul is not saying: first get your head clear and then aim it. He is saying: aim it. And a person can aim in a direction while carrying all sorts of material, in the same way a man can drive toward a town on a road with a great deal of weather coming across it.

That matters enormously to somebody on a line, because clearance is not available to you. You cannot step out, you cannot go and pray in a quiet room, you cannot do anything at all for four more hours. But aim is available. Aim takes no equipment and no privacy and about a second, and it can be done four hundred times a night if it has to be.

You are able to aim, and aim is the entire instruction. The written word gives a direction verb and never a clearing verb, which means the standard was never a mind with nothing in it; and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the turning, on a plant floor, at half past six, with four and a half hours left.

And notice the phrase things above. He gives them somewhere to point. He does not say aim away from. He gives a destination, because a direction with no destination is just avoidance, and avoidance is what you have been doing for nine years and it has not worked.

Not reacting is not consent

I want to take apart the belief directly, because it is the load-bearing wall in this and it is not true.

You concluded that because you did not fight, you agreed. But look at what you actually had available. You had no exit, no privacy, no ability to stop your hands, and a quota running. In that situation, doing nothing is not a choice made from among options. It is the only thing physically available to a man standing where you are standing.

And consent requires an available alternative. A man who does not swim to shore has not chosen the water if his hands are tied.

You were never consenting, and the stillness on your face was a machine running and not a verdict. Isaiah 43:2 says when thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and the verse assumes a person who is in it and going through rather than one who has managed to get out; His Spirit is the one doing the being-with, at whatever pace He keeps, and He is not scoring your composure.

And there is a second half that deserves plain speech. Nine years of concluding that about yourself, four hundred times a night, is not a small accumulation. That is not a thought you have had. That is a thought that has been ground into you by repetition, and no amount of being told once that it is untrue is going to lift nine years of it in an evening.

You are not being asked to feel differently tonight, and nobody is checking whether this has landed yet. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a verse about a God who has never expected a man to be sturdier than He made him; the same Spirit doing that remembering is the one who has stood on that floor with you every shift for nine years.

And if what runs under those eight hours is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it alone. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you do not have to be finished in front of.

Something you can do with your hands full

Here is why this is the right article for a man who cannot leave his post, and it comes down to what the instruction actually costs.

Aiming costs a second. It requires no privacy. It can be done with both hands full, standing up, with a machine running, with six people downstream depending on you, in the middle of a run, on a Tuesday, at half past six.

That is not a small thing. That is the first instruction in nine years that fits inside your actual life. Everything else you have been handed, and probably everything you have ever heard preached about the mind, assumed a quiet room, a Bible open, a person free to stop. You have never had those at half past six. You have a second, and a second is enough for an aim.

You have exactly what this instruction requires, and you have had it the whole time. Scripture says set your affection on things above, and setting is one motion rather than a program; the Holy Spirit is the one who put a page in front of you before your shift so you could get a sentence ready in the daylight.

So line six is not a place where you agree to things for eight hours. It is a floor with a machine on it, and a man who has never been written up in nine years, and something that surfaces and gets aimed past.