I Cannot Take the Day Off

Every page here starts the same way. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write ever stands in the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. This article has one job, and the job is a phone call. If it is yours to make, make it before you finish reading.

Now. Let me put your reason on the table, because it is a good one and it deserves respect before I take it apart.

You cannot take the time. The shift does not cover itself. There is nobody to swap with, or asking would cost you something with a manager who keeps a tally, or the hours are the hours and the money is the money and that is the shape of the week.

I am not going to pretend that is nothing. For a lot of people that is the most real constraint in their life and it is rude to wave it away.

But I want to show you the sum you have been doing, because you have not written it down, and things that never get written down are where we hide the worst arithmetic we do.

He asks the question about the trade

There is a question of Jesus about profit that gets preached at people in a lot of ways, and the mechanism underneath it is a question about exchange rates.

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mark 8:36, King James Version)

Let me be careful, because this verse is about a soul and I am not about to swap a soul for a body. Those are not the same thing and I will not pretend they are.

What I am borrowing is the arithmetic. The question He is asking is about trading something that cannot be replaced for something that can. He does not say the world is worthless. He says look at the exchange rate.

You are being asked one plain question about a trade, and nobody has ever once been shamed by that question into anything. Mark 8:36 is a question rather than an accusation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody look at their own exchange rate without flinching from it.

That is the whole of it. Not, how dare you work. Not, your job does not matter. Just: look at what is on each side of the balance, because you have not looked.

You have been trading without ever writing the sum down. The Spirit of God is the one who puts a person's own arithmetic in front of them plainly, and it is written as a question about profit, which is a word about what gets kept and what gets lost.

Name the shift out loud

Here is the practical part, and it is a small hard exercise.

Name the shift. Not the job. The actual shift you would be giving up. Tuesday morning, the particular hours, the particular tasks.

Now tell me honestly whether you will remember that specific morning in a year.

I have asked people this and almost nobody can name last month's shifts. They are not memorable, and that is not an insult to the work. It is what shift work is. It repeats, and it has to, and that is what makes it possible to live on.

You are protecting something that does not survive a year, and the protecting has never once been proportionate. Mark 8:36 puts a replaceable thing on one side of a balance and an irreplaceable one on the other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody weigh their own week honestly.

And the other half, which nobody says to women who work like you do. There is a good chance you have never actually asked. The refusal you are planning around is one you have predicted rather than received.

You were never told no, and the no has never once been said out loud to you. The Spirit of God is the one who gets a person to ask a question they have been answering on somebody else's behalf, and what is written poses a question rather than assuming the answer.

The plain routing, and it costs one morning

Here is the part of this page that is not comfort. On this page it is the only thing being asked for.

If something is happening right now that frightens you, that is 911, and it does not go round the schedule, it happens now. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And the thing you have been putting off goes to a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist today, even if the appointment they give you is at a terrible time.

You are allowed to ask for a morning, and asking has never once been the same as being given one. Mark 8:36 asks about profit and loss in a way that puts the question back in a person's own hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves somebody from planning around a no to asking a question.

Book first, then ask. That is the order that works, and I have watched it work in a lot of lives. An appointment that exists is a different conversation from an appointment you might need.

You have a way to have that conversation from solid ground, and the passage has never once asked anybody to negotiate from nowhere. The Spirit of God is the one who steadies a person asking a manager for something, and what is written makes the weighing the person's own to do.