The Ordinary Years She Cannot Weigh

She has been trying, on and off since the spring, to work out what she has done.

Not in a bitter way. She is not a bitter woman and she would be embarrassed by this article thinking she was. It is a question that arrived at seventy-one and has kept coming back, and it is this: forty years of ordinary days, and what is the sum.

She raised three. She kept a house. She cooked something like forty thousand meals, which is a number she worked out one afternoon and wishes she had not. She looked after her mother for the last five years of that woman's life and her mother-in-law for two. She was at a school gate for nineteen consecutive years. She has cleaned the same four rooms in the same order since 1983.

None of it is anything. That is the thought, and she knows how it sounds, and she has never said it to a single person.

And what she cannot do is weigh it. If somebody handed her a life like hers on paper she would say it was a good life without hesitating. Held up against her own, from inside, it will not come out to anything she can hold.

Anybody at the far end of a life of ordinary days knows this. And I want to say now, and mean it: nobody in this article is going to be handed a legacy project, and nobody is going to be told that a person who leaves nothing visible has wasted a life. If that were true it would be true of most of the best people who have ever lived.

Establish thou the work of our hands

Let me put down the last line of a psalm and notice what it asks for.

And let the beauty of the LORD our God be upon us: and establish thou the work of our hands upon us; yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.Psalm 90:17

He asks twice. That is not a mistake and Hebrew does not do that by accident. Establish thou the work of our hands, and then, in case anybody missed it, the work of our hands establish thou it.

And notice who does the establishing in that request. Not the hands. The hands do the work and God does the establishing, and the whole psalm before it has been ninety verses of a man staring at how short a life is and how fast it goes.

You are asking the right Person to establish it, and the establishing was never assigned to the one doing the work. That is not a nice thought handed to a woman podding peas. It is what is written in Psalm 90, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a kitchen in the late morning. The years cannot be weighed by the person who lived them. The establishing belongs to God.

And here is the part that speaks straight to her: the psalm never says what the work was. It does not distinguish between great work and ordinary work. The work of our hands is the whole category, and forty thousand meals are in it.

You have been doing work that the psalm names without ranking, and it asked God to establish all of it. Psalm 90:17 is where that stands, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an old prayer land in a woman who worked out a number one afternoon and wishes she had not.

Nobody is going to weigh it either

Now the part this category exists for.

She is not going to be given a way to measure it. There is not one. Anybody who offers a woman at seventy-one a method for tallying her life is selling something, and the tally would be wrong however it came out.

And nobody who leaves nothing visible has wasted a life. Not her. Not the women in that lane before her. The arithmetic that measures a life by what can be pointed at would have deleted almost everyone in Scripture, most of whom are named in a list and nothing else.

I want to say something else, gently, because it is the actual answer to her question and she has never been handed it.

She cannot weigh it because she is inside it. Nobody can weigh their own life. That is not a defect in her assessment, it is the position she is standing in, and the psalm was written by somebody who had the same problem, which is why it ends by handing the whole matter to God rather than solving it.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.Psalm 90:12

Even the numbering is asked for rather than performed. It is five verses above the establishing, in the same prayer, by the same man.

You were never given the job of numbering your own days, and Moses had to ask for it too. Psalm 90:12 is where that is written, and it is the Spirit of God who lets a woman put down a calculation she was never equipped to make.

You are established right now, at this table, in the middle of a sum you cannot do. It is written that the work of our hands is what God is asked to establish, twice, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in a woman with forty years of ordinary days behind her.

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 what the question has been since the spring. At seventy-one a persistent question about whether anything counted deserves a real conversation, and being told God establishes the work has never been a reason to have it alone.