The Long Hour Before the Shift Ends

Between four and five in the morning is the longest hour in the world and everybody who has ever done nights will tell you the same thing about it.

Faris is thirty-three and he has worked that counter for four years. Ten at night to six in the morning, four nights on, three off.

The first half is fine. There is trade until about half past midnight and then the taxi drivers, and then a run of people you get to know, and Faris likes all of it. He likes the woman who comes in at three on a Wednesday and does not want to talk, and the young man who buys the same four things every night and has never once been rude, and the silence in between.

And then four o'clock.

Nobody comes in between four and five. The radio has gone to the show that is not for anybody. The strip light over the chiller has the flicker in it that he has reported twice. His eyes have that grit and his defenses are as thin as they get.

It arrives at about ten past.

I am not going to describe it and I am not going to guess it. It is not my business and it is not this article's business, and if you have been braced for a paragraph naming the sort of thing this is, there is not one and there never was going to be.

What matters is that it arrives, on most of those nights, in that hour, and that Faris has been a believer for twelve years and it still does.

And here is the conclusion he has reached, which he has never said out loud, and which he holds with a kind of settled sadness rather than any drama.

A real one would not still want it. Twelve years. If it were genuine, if he were genuinely His, this would have gone by now, or at least got quieter, and it has not, and therefore something about the whole thing is not what he thought it was.

He wipes the counter, which does not need wiping.

And then, at about twenty past four, entirely out of nowhere, a thought turns up that he has never had in twelve years.

He has never once asked whether Jesus wanted anything He did not have.

He knows the verse. He could have quoted it at nineteen. He has never applied it to a Tuesday at ten past four.

You have that conclusion. Yours has different words and probably a different number of years. But you know it is there, and you know you hold it quietly, and you know you have never said it out loud to a single person.

He suffered it. That is the word.

Hebrews 2 spends most of its length on why the Son had to become like us, and the last verse of the chapter is the one that ought to have been read over you years ago.

For in that he himself hath suffered being tempted, he is able to succour them that are tempted.Hebrews 2:18

He himself hath suffered being tempted.

Read the verb. Suffered. Not committed. Not fell into. Not was compromised by. Suffered, which is what you do to something that is done to you, and which is the word the New Testament reaches for when it describes what happened to Christ in Gethsemane and on the cross.

Temptation, in that sentence, is on the list of things that were done to Him and hurt.

You are suffering something, and Scripture calls it by that word, and it is already the word He used about His own experience. That is the written word and not my comfort at a counter, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the last line of Hebrews 2 and lays it on a wiped counter at twenty past four.

That single verb takes your conclusion apart, and I want to be very precise about how.

Your reasoning goes: this is still here, therefore something is wrong with my standing. It treats the presence of the pull as a diagnostic. And Hebrews puts the pull in the same sentence as the sinless Son, using a suffering word, which means the presence of it diagnoses nothing at all about whether a person belongs to God.

If wanting were evidence, the verse could not exist.

The qualification for helping

Now the second half, because it tells you what the whole thing was for.

He is able to succor them that are tempted.

Able. It is a word about capacity, and the sentence gives the reason for the capacity: because He suffered it Himself. The having-been-through-it is what qualifies Him to help.

And look at the verb. Succor is an old word and it is worth keeping. It means to run to the aid of somebody who is crying out. It is not advice, it is not distance, it is not a policy on your situation. It is the word for what a person does when they hear a shout and go.

You are able to be helped by Someone qualified by experience, and that help is already available at ten past four. Hebrews 2 says he is able to succor in exactly those words, and the same Spirit who was upon Him in the wilderness is the one making it a present fact in a man behind a till with a strip light flickering.

Let me guard this the way it has to be guarded, because this is the category where a careless sentence does the most damage.

I am not telling you that the pull is fine, or that nothing matters, or that what you do with it is a detail. It is not a detail and you know it is not, and I am not going to insult you at four in the morning by pretending.

And I am not ranking anything. This article does not know what yours is and does not know whether it is heavier or lighter than anybody else's, and Scripture does not maintain that league table either.

And this is the one that matters most: a stronger pull does not mean a weaker standing. There is no verse anywhere that reads the intensity of what a person is fighting as a measurement of how much they belong to God, and the man in Hebrews who is described as having suffered being tempted is the one person in history who never once gave in.