My Real Life Starts At Six

There is a person whose whole actual life happens after the working day ends, and who half suspects this makes them a fraud.

Picture him. He works in a call center from eight until five. He is competent and pleasant and he does not care about it in any way at all.

And at six he runs a boys club.

Thirty boys, three nights a week, and a Saturday morning in the season. He knows every one of their names and most of their situations. He has driven two of them to hospital. He has been to four funerals and three weddings that came out of that club, and there is a man of thirty one who still calls him on his birthday.

That is his life. The call center is the arrangement that makes it possible.

And here is what he cannot say to anybody, and it has been sitting in him for about six years. He thinks it makes him some kind of imposter.

Because everybody around him seems to have one life, integrated, where the work is the thing and the person is the work. And he has two, and one of them he does not care about at all, and he suspects that a properly formed man would not be able to spend nine hours a day on something he is indifferent to.

He has never once considered that this is an extremely old arrangement, and that the most influential man in the New Testament after Jesus had exactly the same one.

Luke bothers to record the trade

There is a verse in Acts that most readers skim, and the fact that it is there at all is the point.

And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers. (Acts 18:3, King James Version)

By their occupation they were tentmakers.

Luke is writing the account of the spread of the church. He has limited space. He has already left out enormous amounts. And he stops to record what Paul did for a living, and it is manual, and it is unremarkable, and it involved leather and heavy needles and stiff cloth.

That is in the book on purpose.

You are looking at a working arrangement the account thought worth recording, and Acts 18 says by their occupation they were tentmakers in plain words (Acts 18:3), and the Holy Spirit is the one who made sure that detail survived when so much else did not.

And Paul mentions it himself, twice, and both times without apology.

Yea, ye yourselves know, that these hands have ministered unto my necessities, and to them that were with me. (Acts 20:34)

These hands. He holds them up. He is not embarrassed about them and he does not present them as a compromise.

You have hands that ministered to necessities, and Acts 20 has a man holding them up in a farewell speech rather than leaving them out (Acts 20:34), and the Spirit of God is the one who was in both halves of that man's arrangement at once.

Labor and travail, night and day

There is a line in Thessalonians where he describes the actual shape of it, and the timing in it is exactly the shape of this man's week.

For ye remember, brethren, our labour and travail: for labouring night and day, because we would not be chargeable unto any of you, we preached unto you the gospel of God. (1 Thessalonians 2:9)

Working night and day, and preaching.

Both. At the same time. In the same weeks. The trade paid for the ministry and the ministry was the reason for the trade, and neither one was the real life with the other one as a support act.

And he does not describe the tentmaking as something he endured in order to reach the good part. He describes it as part of the same account.

You have an arrangement that is described as one life rather than as two, and 1 Thessalonians 2 puts the working and the preaching in a single sentence (1 Thessalonians 2:9), and it is the Holy Spirit who was in the leather and in the letters without any distinction between them.

You are not a fraud for not caring about a call center, and Acts 18:3 records a trade without one word about whether the man found it fulfilling (Acts 18:3), and the Spirit of God is the one who never once asked that question of anybody.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could be misused.

This is not saying he should do the call center badly. He does not, and doing it well is part of the arrangement working. Nobody funds an evening by being unreliable in the morning.

It is also not saying everybody should find a thing outside work. Some people do not have the hours, or the health, or the situation, and this is not a new standard.

And it is not saying the boys club is the real thing and the call center is the fake thing. That is the exact division this article is taking apart.

And plainly: if the day job has become the kind of weight that reaches into the evening as well, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you wants it all to stop, that is bigger than a two part week. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. That is not a failure.

You are not being told to divide your week into a good half and a bad one, and 1 Thessalonians 2 puts both halves in one sentence about one life (1 Thessalonians 2:9), and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a whole week together rather than approving of a part of it.