Waiting On the Man Who Is Waiting On Me

There are two of them on that site and only one of them is being paid, and both of them know it, and neither of them has said it.

The job is a decent one. He priced it right and it has run well and the work is good. And the client, who is not a villain, is on his own arrangement with a bank and a solicitor and a chain of his own, and the invoice went in six weeks ago and there have been two emails and one very pleasant phone call in which nothing at all was agreed.

So he is out.

And behind him, on the same site, in the same weather, is a man he has used for eleven years. Steady. Never once left him short handed. Turns up in the dark in February.

He has been paid for the first stage and nothing since.

Now, the reasoning is airtight, and the man himself would probably accept it. I have not been paid. When I am paid, you will be paid. Everybody in this trade knows that sentence and everybody has said it, and nine times out of ten it is simply true.

But here is what has actually been happening. He has been on that site four days this week and he has not once had a proper conversation with him. He hands him things. He talks about the weather and the delivery. There is a specific way he has been standing, slightly turned, and he caught himself doing it on Wednesday and did not like it at all.

Because the reasoning is airtight and the man still cannot pay his own diesel.

You know that site. Yours might be an office where you owe somebody an answer while somebody owes you one. It might be a family thing that has three people in it and only one of them is short. There is a chain, and you are somewhere in the middle of it, and being owed has quietly become a license to be the one who owes.

Sit down on the tailgate. Light is good. There is a law here about paying, and it is more stubborn than any of us are comfortable with.

There is no code, and there is a day

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this place promises a secret and I am not going to hold a man in a bad month with a hint of one.

There is no code. There is nothing here that gets your invoice paid, and nothing that makes fair dealing into a lever that shakes money out of a client. These old laws cost the man who keeps them and promise him nothing, and that is exactly how you know they were not written by anybody trying to sell you something.

Here is the law.

Thou shalt not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: At his day thou shalt give him his hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it; for he is poor, and setteth his heart upon it.Deuteronomy 24:14-15

Read the last clause. That is the one that has been sitting with me for years. He setteth his heart upon it. God does not argue about cash flow. He tells you what the man is doing while he waits. He is looking at it. He has spent it in his head. He has told his wife it is coming Friday.

And notice the thing that is missing from the whole passage. There is no clause about the employer's own position. Nothing that says: unless you yourself are owed. Nothing about circumstances. God knew perfectly well that a man in the middle of a chain would be the ordinary case, because in an agricultural economy almost everybody is waiting on somebody, and He wrote the law anyway with no relief valve in it.

You are not being called cruel, and being owed is a real thing that is really happening to you. That is not me going soft on the passage. It is what the written passage does: it addresses one relationship, yours and his, and it declines to discuss anything else, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old wage law and lays it across a half built porch on a Wednesday.

You have a God who looked at this from the waiting man's side and wrote the rule from there, and He has never once built one around the convenience of whoever is holding the money. Scripture says at his day, which is a phrase about the man rather than about the ledger, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient line sit on a man's chest instead of merely passing through his head.

Now let me say the true thing, because you already found it on Wednesday.

You are not standing turned away from him because of the money. You are standing turned away because you cannot bear being, in his eyes, another one in the chain. You have spent eleven years being the man who pays. That is your whole name in this trade. And a bad client has put you in a position that looks, from the other end of a site, exactly like the men you have both complained about in cars for a decade.

That is what has closed your mouth. Not meanness. Shame with a hard hat on.

You are not that kind of man, and one bad month is not a verdict on eleven years. Scripture says the righteous falleth seven times and riseth up again, which is a sentence about a life rather than about a week, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line like that and gets a man's shoulders back.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a site does not change because a man thought hard about it on a tailgate. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what putting up with it never does. So speak, out loud, in the truck. You have the standing to tell a shame in your own life what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by trade, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a windscreen.