Eleven Years and Then a Title

They said your name and the room did the thing rooms do, and somebody two seats along squeezed your arm, and you smiled and said thank you.

And you were not there.

Eleven years. Four rounds. Four times somebody else, and two of those four you trained, which is a sentence you have never said out loud to a single person in that building.

You are good at this job. That is not in dispute anywhere, and it has never been in dispute, which is what made the four rounds so difficult to hold. If you had been told you were not ready, there would have been something to work on. There was never anything to work on. There was just, each time, somebody else.

And now there is a title, and a slightly better chair, and an email that went round.

You went home and told your sister and she screamed down the phone, which was the correct response and which you loved her for, and you put the phone down and stood in the kitchen and felt exactly nothing.

That was three weeks ago. It has not arrived yet.

The psalmist speaks to his own soul

There is a line in Psalm 116 where a man turns and addresses himself.

Return unto thy rest, O my soul; for the LORD hath dealt bountifully with thee.Psalm 116:7

That is a strange sentence when you look at it. He is not praying. He is speaking to his own soul, and telling it to come back to a rest it has evidently been away from.

Return assumes an absence. Something in him has been out somewhere, braced, on duty, and he is calling it home.

And he is doing that in a psalm where he has just said the sorrows of death compassed him. This is not a man for whom things have been fine.

You are being called back from somewhere you have been standing for eleven years. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says return unto thy rest, O my soul, Psalm 116:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who calls a person's soul home rather than ordering it to feel something.

What eleven years of that actually does

Here is why the meeting did nothing, and it is not ingratitude.

Four rounds taught your nervous system one lesson very thoroughly: do not get your hopes up in this building. Not out loud, not privately, not for a second, because the cost of getting them up and being wrong is enormous and you paid it four times.

That lesson kept you upright and let you keep working next to two people you had trained. It was not weakness. It was the thing that got you here.

And it does not switch off because somebody said your name in a meeting. The part of you that stopped expecting is still on duty, still declining to celebrate in case it has to be taken back.

You have not lost the ability to feel it. Scripture says He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit does that binding at His own pace in a woman who spent eleven years learning not to hope in one particular room.

Nobody gets to say it was worth it

Somebody will say it. Probably several people, and they will mean it warmly. It was worth the wait. Or the other one: everything happens for a reason.

The second one is not true and you may put it straight down.

And the first is not theirs to say. That judgement belongs to the woman who trained two of the four, and to nobody else on this earth, and when somebody says it on your behalf they take the one thing eleven years left in your hands.

So I am not going to say it. I do not know whether it was worth it, and neither does anybody who squeezed your arm in that room.

You are the only one with standing to weigh those eleven years, and you may take as long as you like. Scripture lets a man tell God the sorrows of death compassed him before he says anything about bounty, Psalm 116:3, and the Holy Spirit has never demanded a summary as the price of comfort.

The title is not a payment

And here is the arithmetic that has been running under three quiet weeks.

You have started treating the promotion as a settlement. Eleven years in one column, a title in the other, books balanced, everybody may now move on.

That is not what happened. The years were not installments and the title is not a reimbursement, and they were never in the same ledger. Scripture keeps gift and endurance in separate hands, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit has never once presented anybody with an invoice.

You are not being paid out, you are being given something. Scripture says the Lord hath dealt bountifully with thee, Psalm 116:7, and bountifully is the language of a gift and not of a balance being cleared, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a woman a title as a receipt.