Forty-Two, and a Degree

It is in a drawer in the sideboard, still in the cardboard tube it came in, because you never got round to a frame and then getting round to a frame started to feel like a statement.

Six years of evenings. Two of those years with the youngest still small enough to be up at eleven. The whole of one summer given to a dissertation on a laptop at the kitchen table with the fan on.

You finished at forty-two. Your daughter made a cake.

That was two years ago.

Nothing has changed. Not one thing. Same role, same rota, same three people who have been there longer and are not going anywhere. You applied for two things and heard nothing on the first and got a polite no on the second.

And what has quietly become the sharpest part of it is not the applications.

It is that nobody has ever asked you what you studied. Not once in two years, not at work, not at a family thing, not by anybody who knew you were doing it. People asked constantly while it was happening, because a thing in progress is a conversation. A thing completed with no visible consequence is not.

So it is in a tube in a drawer, and you are forty-four, and it sits there being the largest thing you have ever done and the least discussed.

The psalm puts the season out of the tree's hands

There is a line in the first psalm that everybody quotes and hardly anybody reads carefully.

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.Psalm 1:3

Planted. Passive. Somebody put it there. The tree did not select the site.

In his season. Not on request. Not on schedule. A tree does not decide when it fruits and nobody has ever persuaded one.

And then the leaf. His leaf also shall not wither, which is the part people skip, and it is a promise about the years when there is no fruit at all. A tree with no fruit and green leaves is not a dead tree. It is a tree between seasons, and the psalm names that state specifically and calls it well.

You are green and you are between seasons, and Scripture has a word for that exact condition. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says his leaf also shall not wither, Psalm 1:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and sets it down beside a cardboard tube in a sideboard.

Nothing here is advice

Not one word of this page is about your career.

I do not know your field or your town or the two things you applied for. Nobody outside that has any standing to suggest an approach, and there is a particular unkindness in implying that better technique would have converted six years of evenings into something by now.

So nothing here reads two quiet years as a report on your effort. Scripture never reads a shut door that way, Revelation 3:8, and the Holy Spirit is not the voice suggesting you should have been cleverer about it.

You have not been overlooked by God since the cake. That was true at forty-two and it is true now.

What nobody asking has done

Here is the actual injury, and it is worth naming exactly.

You did not do it for the compliments. That is true, and you would say it, and it is not the point.

What has happened is subtler. Two years of nobody asking has begun to function as a valuation. Nobody asks about things that matter, so if nobody asks, perhaps it did not matter.

That reasoning is everywhere and it is completely wrong. People do not ask because a completed thing with no visible change has no obvious conversational handle. It is a fact about small talk. It is not a market signal.

You are not worth what the room asks about. Scripture says man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Holy Spirit does not price a woman's six years off whether anybody found a way to bring it up at a christening.

What six years of evenings actually made

And here is the part that is genuinely true and that nobody will say to you.

Something exists now that did not exist before, and it is not the certificate.

There is a woman who can hold a difficult argument in her head for a fortnight and come out the other side with a view. There is a woman who taught herself to work at a kitchen table at eleven at night with a child on her hip. There is a daughter who watched all of that happen at close range and who is now sixteen and who has never once said a word about it and will remember it for the whole of her life.

None of that is in a tube.

You have what the six years actually made, and you have had it the whole time. Scripture says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, Hebrews 6:10, and the Holy Spirit keeps a fuller record than a job market does.