They Cut My Hours

They cut your hours.

Not your job. That is the part that makes it hard to talk about, because on paper nothing happened. You still have the badge. You still go in. There was no meeting, or there was a meeting that took four minutes and used the word restructure.

And the schedule came out and there were fewer of your squares on it, and nobody said anything to you about why.

Here is what I think happened next, and stop me if I am wrong.

You did not think about the money first. You thought about what it meant. You went back through the last few months looking for the thing you did wrong, or the day somebody noticed something, and you have been running that search ever since in the background, while you work the hours you still have.

You are the same worker you were on Thursday, and a schedule has never once been a ruling on a man.

And I am not going to tell you the hours come back. They might not. I do not know the shape of that place and I will not pretend the schedule is a temporary thing to be waited out.

What I will do is take the verdict off the table, because you have been carrying two different problems as if they were one, and only one of them is actually about money.

Go in this thy might

There is a man in Judges hiding in a winepress threshing wheat, which is the wrong place to do it, because he is trying not to be seen.

An angel calls him a mighty man of valor while he is doing that, which reads almost like a joke, and he answers the way anybody would. He lists his disadvantages. His family is poor. He is the least in his father's house.

And the LORD looked upon him, and said, Go in this thy might, and thou shalt save Israel from the hand of the Midianites: have not I sent thee? (Judges 6:14, King James Version)

Go in this thy might.

Not go and get some might. Not wait here until might is provided. Go in this one, the one you have got, in the winepress, while you are still explaining why you are the least.

You are being sent out in what you already have rather than in what you are waiting to be given, and a man's own strength has never once had to be certified before it counted. Judges 6:14 says go in this thy might, and the Holy Spirit is the one who calls a hiding man mighty before he has done a single thing.

And look at what God does not do in that verse. He does not correct the self assessment.

Gideon says he is the least. God does not say no you are not. God just sends him anyway, which is a far stranger kind of answer and a far more useful one.

You have not been asked to feel like a mighty man before moving, and being sent has never once waited on a person agreeing with the description. The Spirit of God is the one who does the sending, and it is written in Judges 6:14 as a question: have not I sent thee.

A schedule is a decision about a schedule

Let me say something about what the cut actually is, because I think it has been allowed to say more than it has any right to say.

Hours get cut for reasons that have nothing to do with the person losing them. A contract ended. The season turned. Somebody upstairs was told to bring a number down and pulled the lever that was nearest to hand. Two people came back from leave.

None of that reaches you. Nobody comes and explains it. So the mind fills the silence, and the mind fills it with you, because that is what a mind does in a silence.

You are filling in a blank that was never about you, and a cut schedule has never once arrived with an explanation attached. The written word has a man reading his own poverty as a disqualification, and the Holy Spirit is the one who cuts across that reading in Judges 6 before it can settle.

Here is the test I would offer, and it is a plain one.

Your hands on Monday are the same hands that were on the clock last month. The work done on that floor is the same work, at the same standard, by the same man.

If the quality had changed, you would know. Somebody would have said something, because places like that always say something.

You are the same worker at the same standard, and fewer squares on a board have never once made a man worse at the thing he does. Judges 6:14 sends a man in the might he has right now, and the Spirit of God is the one who measures a person by that rather than by what a building decided this quarter.

So the money problem is real, and we will get to it. The verdict is not real, and I want it put down before we do, because a man who thinks he has been judged works differently than a man who thinks he has been reassigned.

What is left in the week

Now the practical part, and it is not a scheme and it is not a plan.

There are hours back in that week. That is the thing nobody says out loud, because it arrived as a loss and it is easier to see it as a hole than as a block of time.

I am not being clever about that. The money is the problem. But the block of time is real and it is sitting there, and at the moment it is being spent on the search for what you did wrong.

You have a stretch of the week in your own hands that is currently being used for a court case that is not being held, and hours spent on a verdict have never once paid anybody. The Holy Spirit is the one who redirects a man's attention, and Judges 6:14 moves a man out of a winepress and into a field.

One line. One thing you could do this week that a person would pay you for.

It does not have to be a new thing. For most men it is the thing they do at home, or the thing they do for their brother in law, or the thing everybody at work asks them to look at because they are good at it.

And one plain sentence that belongs right here. If the cut has taken you somewhere darker than a thinner check, if you have been awake at three in the morning turning over whether your family would be better off without you, then put this article down and call or text 988, the crisis line, today. Say it to a doctor, a counselor or a pastor you trust. That is not a change of subject. That is the most important thing on this page.

You are allowed to need somebody qualified holding the other end of this, and asking for that has never once been a thing a strong man was disqualified for. The written word has an angel sitting down with a frightened man under a tree, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a real human helper in reach.