You Work With Your Body And You Have To Eat

He is up at half past four and he is lifting by six, and there is a moment at about eleven when the morning food runs out, and if he gets that wrong the whole afternoon goes wrong with it.

That is not a preference. That is the arithmetic of a body doing eight hours of physical work with three other men depending on it, one of whom is twenty and still learning, and a load that has to be somewhere by four o'clock.

He has heard this subject talked about for years. In church, on a podcast a friend sent him, once at a men's breakfast where a very sincere man spoke for forty minutes.

And every single time, quietly, without anybody meaning it, the picture that came across was of a person with a flexible morning.

Somebody who can be tired at eleven and sit down. Somebody whose job does not have a load on it and does not have a twenty year old on a roof depending on them being sharp.

So over about a decade a suspicion has settled in him, and he has never said it to anybody because of how it sounds: the deep end of this belongs to people with lighter jobs, and men like him get the shallow end and are told it is the same.

And a friend at church said last month about a matter in his family: this is one to fast about, brother.

He said he would think on it. And what he actually thought, driving home in the truck, was that he could not, and that it did not seem to be a thing anybody had considered.

If you have a job that would make this dangerous, come and sit on the tailgate here a while.

Name the ranking, because it is real

Let us say the thing plainly before any Scripture gets opened.

That ranking is not imaginary. It is not usually in anybody's words and it is almost never in anybody's intention, and it is in the pictures. Most of the illustrations in this subject are drawn from a life with slack in it, and a man whose day has no slack in it hears that and files himself accordingly.

That is a fault in the illustrations. It is not a fault in your work and it is not a fault in you.

You are not in the shallow end of anything, and there is no deep end that a different job would have got you into. That is not a soft word on a tailgate. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been up at half past four with you every working morning of the last ten years, and has never once ranked a man by the weight of his day.

What Jesus said when hungry men were criticized

There is a scene where working men were criticized for eating, and it is worth reading who Jesus takes the side of.

His disciples were walking through a field and they were hungry, and they picked grain and ate it, and the serious people objected on entirely religious grounds.

And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath.Mark 2:27

Read the shape of that sentence. He does not defend the men by lowering the standard. He turns the whole thing around and says which was made for which.

The practice exists for people. People do not exist to service the practice. And the specific case He said it about was hungry men eating because their bodies needed it, which He treats as an entirely acceptable reason and not as a concession.

You are the one that all of it was made for, and it was never the other way about. I am not saying that to make an early morning easier: it is the plain sense of what He said and what He said it about (Mark 2:27), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it something a man can carry in a cab at half past four.

And the eating is not a compromise

Here is the sentence for the moment at eleven o'clock.

Eating what the work requires is not a concession you are making. It is not the lesser road. It is the right and responsible thing for a man with three others depending on him and a twenty year old on a roof, and there is no version of God's will in which somebody gets hurt because you were light headed at two in the afternoon.

You are doing the right thing when you eat, and there is nothing spiritual on the other side of that scale. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and it is His Spirit who makes that a real permission at a tailgate rather than a general kindness.

And nobody here is going to hand you a scaled down practice to fit around a shift. That would agree with the whole ranking, and the ranking is what is wrong.

Now the rule this site says on every page. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. Physical work, any medical condition, medication, pregnancy, a history of a hard relationship with eating, being underweight, unwell, elderly or simply unsure: speak to your doctor and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of what a working day requires. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to a man on account of his job.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.