The Only Way The Shift Ends

The tailgate is down and Malia is sitting on it with her boots off, and the parking lot is nearly empty, and it is twenty past eleven at night.

She is not a drinker. That is the first thing she would tell you and it is nearly true. She does not drink at weddings. She does not drink at home in the afternoon. She has no interest in it, none, in any of the ordinary places people have an interest in it.

She drinks in this parking lot, on this tailgate, at the end of a shift, and then she drives home twenty minutes later, and both of those sentences frighten her at the same time and for different reasons.

Twelve hours. She has been on her feet for twelve hours in a building that does not have a window in the part she works in, and there is a particular thing that happens to a body after twelve hours which nobody who has not done it understands: the day does not come out.

It is in her arms. It is in her jaw. It is in the specific place at the base of the neck where a whole shift goes to live. She could lie down right now on a good bed in a quiet room and her body would keep working. It would keep lifting, and turning, and answering, and it would do that for about two hours, and she knows this because she has tried it hundreds of times.

Two beers switch it off.

That is the whole of it and it is not a mystery and there is nothing glamorous about it. Two beers on a tailgate and the day finally comes out of her arms and she can go home and lie down like a person.

She has tried the other things. She tried the shower, she tried the walk, she tried the tea somebody at work swore by, she tried an app, she tried lying there. She is not lazy and she is not looking for an excuse. She has genuinely tried them and they genuinely did not work and she is being honest about that in an empty parking lot at twenty past eleven.

If somebody takes this off me, I want to know what I am supposed to do with a body that will not stop.

And here is where I stop talking about Malia, because you have your own tailgate, and it is a fair question, and nobody who lectures you has ever answered it.

So I am going to name the wound first and I am going to say it in your favor: you are not a person indulging themselves. You are a tired worker who found the only switch that has ever worked, and that is a different thing entirely, and it deserves an answer and not a sermon.

Sleep is a gift, not a discipline

Let me put the true thing down first, on the tailgate, before anything else.

Rest is not something you are failing to achieve. It is not a skill you lack and it is not a virtue you have not developed. It is a gift, given, and God gives it while people are asleep, which is exactly when nobody is capable of earning anything.

I would not have thought of it that way on my own. It is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a parking lot at twenty past eleven:

It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so He gives His beloved sleep.Psalm 127:2

Take the shape of that verse seriously. It is addressed to workers. It names the early rising and the sitting up late and the bread eaten in sorrow, and it does not scold any of it. Then it turns and calls the worker His beloved, and says the sleep is given.

So the rest you have been trying to manufacture at the end of twelve hours is a thing God hands out, and Scripture is where I stand that rather than my own theory, and His Spirit is the one who makes it something your body can receive rather than a verse you nod at.

Your question deserves a real answer

Now let me answer the thing you actually asked, because you asked it honestly and honest questions are owed honest answers.

You asked what you are supposed to do with a body that will not stop. Here is the truthful answer in two parts, and neither part is a lecture.

The first part is medical, and it is not a fob off. A body that cannot come down after twelve hours is a real, physical situation with real, physical answers, and there are people whose actual job is that. Shift work does specific measurable things to a nervous system. Say to a doctor exactly what you told nobody: twelve hours, no window, two beers on a tailgate, twenty past eleven, and it is the only thing that has ever worked. That sentence, said out loud in a consulting room, is not a confession. It is a person handing over a real problem to somebody equipped for it.

The second part is the thing underneath, and it is bigger. You have been carrying the whole shift home because there was nobody to hand it to. Hear this: you are not the one holding the day up. You never were, and the day did not depend on you keeping hold of it after eleven, and there is Someone who has been awake for the whole of it and does not need you to keep watch. That is written, and God's Spirit is the one who makes it a thing your shoulders can actually feel instead of a sentiment. And it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land in you rather than merely read well.

And here is the serious half, said as carefully as I mean it. If you have been drinking every night, please do not simply stop on your own. Coming off alcohol without medical supervision can be genuinely dangerous, and that is not a reason to keep going, it is the reason to see a doctor this week. Keep every other real help too: the meeting, the counselor, the medicine, the friend on the crew who would drive you. None of it competes with what God is doing in you and none of it is a smaller faith. It is His kindness arriving with a face and a phone number.