The Application She Will Not Send

Eleven months. She could tell you the exact day she finished it because it was the day after her birthday and she remembers thinking it would be a good year for it.

It is an application to go back and study. Not a career move, she would say if you asked, and she means it. Something she stopped in her twenties for reasons that were entirely sensible at the time and that involved other people who needed things.

She is fifty-three.

And she has a reason for every single day of those eleven months, and here is the thing that eventually made her stop and look at herself: every one of the reasons is genuinely true. The month her daughter had the baby. The stretch when work was impossible. The winter her knee was bad. Not one of them is an excuse in the ordinary sense. Which is why it took eleven months to notice, because a person with a real reason does not look like a person avoiding something.

What she has not said to anybody is the actual reason underneath the eleven true ones. It is not the money and it is not the time. It is that sending it makes a claim about the next four years, and it also makes a quiet claim about the last thirty, which is that they were not the whole of it. And that second claim is the one that frightens her, because if she sends it and it does not work, she will have found out something she has managed not to find out for three decades.

Anybody with a draft in a folder knows this shape. I am not going to tell anybody to send it. That is not mine to say and I do not know her knee, her daughter, her money or her reasons.

Shown the way in the morning

Let me put down a line and notice how much road is being asked for.

Cause me to hear thy lovingkindness in the morning; for in thee do I trust: cause me to know the way wherein I should walk; for I lift up my soul unto thee.Psalm 143:8

In the morning. Not for the year. David is not asking for the whole route, and he is in serious trouble in that psalm, the kind where a person would be entitled to ask for the entire map.

What he asks for is the day's portion. Which is exactly the size that a woman with a folder can actually receive, and exactly the size nobody thinks to ask for, because when a decision is large the instinct is to demand the whole thing before moving.

You are shown the way in morning-sized pieces, and the whole road was never on offer to anybody. That is not a soft word for a woman with an eleven-month draft. It is what is written in Psalm 143, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and sets it into a hallway in the late afternoon. The application is a file. The showing is God's and it comes a morning at a time.

And notice the first thing he asks to hear, before the direction: lovingkindness. He wants to hear that God is good to him before he asks what to do, and the order is not accidental.

You have a lovingkindness to hear first, and no direction has ever been handed to somebody who did not already have it. Psalm 143:8 is where that is written, and it is the Spirit who makes an old prayer land in a woman holding a folder against her chest.

Eleven true reasons

Now the part this category exists for, and it comes first.

She is not lazy and she is not a coward, and I want to dispose of both of those before anybody gets near them. Every one of those eleven reasons was real. A woman who did not go back because her daughter had a baby is not making excuses, she is living in a family.

I am also not going to tell her to send it, and I want to be honest about why: I do not know whether she should. Nobody reading this knows either. Somebody who tells a fifty-three-year-old stranger to chase it is enjoying a story rather than helping a person.

But I will name the thing underneath, gently, because I think naming it does more than any push would.

The fear is not about failing. The fear is about finding out something about thirty years, and that is a completely different fear and it is much heavier, and it deserves to be treated as heavy rather than as procrastination.

Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.Psalm 139:5

Behind and before. Both directions. The thirty years already lived are inside that sentence, not only the four ahead.

You were beset behind as well as before, and the last thirty years are already inside God's hand rather than waiting to be judged. Psalm 139:5 is the written word for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman look at her own decades without a verdict hanging over them.

You are settled right now, in this hallway, with the draft exactly as unsent as it was in the spring. It is written that He causes a person to know the way in which they should walk, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that true in a woman with eleven true reasons.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly about what the eleven months have actually been about. A weight this old deserves a real person in the room, and being settled in God has never been a reason to carry it alone.