The Job That Was My Whole Name

Twenty six years, and the end of it was a meeting in a portable building that took eleven minutes.

They were decent about it. He wants that said. There was a woman from the corporate office who had flown in, and she was not a monster, and she used the word restructuring twice and the word unfortunately three times, and there was a folder with his name spelled correctly on the front of it.

He handed in his badge at the window on the way out. The kid at the window was somebody he had trained.

That was the fourteenth of February. It is now June.

And here is what nobody has said to him, in four months, not once.

Nobody has said: that is a loss.

What they say is: this could be the best thing that ever happened to you. What they say is: you have got skills, somebody will snap you up. What they say is: honestly, you were too good for that place. His brother in law said, at a barbecue, in front of six people, that it was a blessing in disguise and that God closes doors so He can open windows.

And they are all being kind. Every single one of them means well. Two of them have offered to make calls.

But four months in, what he actually has is this. He does not know what to say when somebody asks what he does. He does not know what to do between six and half past two, because that was second shift, and his body still wakes up wrong. He has lost the eleven men he ate lunch with. He has lost the thing he was good at, which was a specific thing, on a specific machine, that maybe forty people in this state could do properly.

And he has lost the sentence. That was the sentence he used to say, and it went, I have been at the mill twenty six years, and every person in this county knew exactly who he was the second he said it.

That sentence does not exist anymore, and there is no funeral for a sentence.

If anybody has sat on a tailgate looking at a fence like that, stay with me. There is a verse in the seventy third psalm that starts by admitting the thing out loud, which is the part everybody skips.

The psalm says the failing part out loud first

Here is the verse, and almost everybody quotes the second half of it and drops the first.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

Faileth. That is the first clause and it is not decoration.

The man writing that psalm is not saying he felt a bit low. The word is used for something giving out, being spent, coming to an end. He is saying: the part of me that holds things up has stopped holding.

And he says it out loud, in the middle of a worship song, before he gets anywhere near the comfort.

That order matters. Scripture does not hand a man a portion and then require him to pretend nothing failed. It lets him name the failing first, in the same breath, in the same verse, on the record.

You are permitted to say out loud that something in you has given out, and you were permitted to say it on the fourteenth of February in the parking lot. Psalm 73:26 is the written word putting my flesh and my heart faileth into a worship song before one word of comfort arrives, and the Spirit who breathed that line is on a tailgate in June with a man looking at a fence.

Now the second half, and I want to be precise about it, because it is not the thing people usually turn it into.

God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever. Portion is a land word. In Israel every tribe got a portion, a share, a piece of ground with their name on it. Except one. The Levites got no land at all, and what they were told, over and over, was that the Lord Himself was their portion.

So the man in that psalm is saying: the ground I stood on is gone, and He is the ground now.

That is not a promise about the next job. It is not an assurance about anything at all in the next twelve months. It is a statement about what a man is standing on when the thing he was standing on is taken.

You are standing on a portion that no company can restructure, and you were standing on it every one of the twenty six years without knowing it. Psalm 73:26 calls God the strength of my heart and my portion for ever, and the Holy Spirit did not attach a single condition about employment to that sentence.

Everything true they said also stopped anybody sitting down

Now let me protect those people, because he will see them at the next barbecue and I do not want anything sitting between them.

A blessing in disguise. Too good for that place. Somebody will snap you up.

Every one of those might turn out to be true. Not one of them was said with any malice at all.

But watch what they all do. They point forward. They move the conversation to a future where this is fine, which means nobody has to stand still in the present where it is not.

And people do that because a man losing his work is frightening. It says something about all of them, and half those men at that barbecue work somewhere that could hold the same meeting in the same portable building on the same kind of Tuesday.

So the optimism was a handrail, and the people gripping it were steadying themselves.

Keep the people. Set the sentences down by the grill and walk away without them.

You are not required to agree that it was a blessing in order to keep those men, and you were never obliged to be encouraged on schedule. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to weep and a time to mourn and sets no exception for a loss that has a bright side, and the Spirit of God does not hand a man an optimistic sentence in order to close a subject.

It was never only a paycheck, and that is not idolatry

Now let me deal with the thing he suspects about himself, because I think it is quietly doing the most damage.

There is a version of church teaching that would say his problem is that he made an idol of his work. That his identity was in a job instead of in Christ, and this is God dealing with that.

I am not going to say that to him, and here is why.

Work is not a modern invention that people have unhealthily attached themselves to. It is in the second chapter of Genesis, before anything at all went wrong, in Eden, as a gift. God put a man there to dress it and to keep it. Doing a thing well, with your hands, in a place, alongside other people, is not a distraction from being human. It is part of how a person was made.

Losing that is a real loss, exactly the way losing a house is a real loss. It does not become idolatry because it hurt.

And notice what he actually misses. Not the money, first. He misses the eleven men. He misses being good at a specific thing. He misses being known in a county. Those are not greed. Those are belonging, competence and recognition, and every one of the three was put in a human being by God on purpose.

You are grieving something God Himself called good, and you were never guilty of worship for loving a job you did well for twenty six years. Genesis 2:15 puts a man into work before the fall and calls it good, and the Holy Spirit does not diagnose idolatry in a man who misses the eleven people he ate lunch with.