The First Month in the Job I Waited For

The lanyard is on the hook by the door and you look at it every morning like it belongs to somebody else.

Four weeks. Your own desk. A parking space with a number. The work is the work you spent nine years describing to people who asked what you were hoping for, and you are good at it, and on Tuesday you solved something before lunch that would have taken the team a fortnight.

You went out to the car afterwards and sat there for five minutes and did not feel anything at all.

Your sister rang on Sunday and said it three times. You must be so happy. You said yes. You have said yes to eleven people now, and every yes has been true in the sense that nothing is wrong, and false in the sense that they are describing a man who is not currently in your body.

Nine years. Two of them were fine. Four were hard. Three were the kind you do not describe to your sister on the phone.

And now it is here, and there is a lanyard on a hook, and somewhere in you there is a room with the light off that has not come back on yet.

The psalm knows about the strangeness

There is a psalm about a homecoming that begins with people not quite believing it.

When the LORD turned again the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, The LORD hath done great things for them. The LORD hath done great things for us; whereof we are glad.Psalm 126:1-3

Like them that dream. That is the phrase to hold. Not like people celebrating. Like people who cannot yet tell whether the thing is real, walking around inside their own good news with the odd, floating quality of a dream you are still half inside.

The laughter comes in the psalm. It comes in verse two, after the dreaming, and Scripture does not say how long the gap was, Psalm 126:2, and the Holy Spirit has never once hurried a man across it.

You are not doing this wrong by feeling nothing in week four. I am not offering you my own reassurance here. Scripture puts the dreaming before the laughter on purpose, Psalm 126:1-2, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over a man in a car park with a stopwatch.

What nine years actually cost

Here is the part almost nobody makes room for, and it is why the lanyard feels like it belongs to someone else.

You did not spend nine years waiting. You spent nine years adapting. You became a man who does not get his hopes up, because getting your hopes up eleven times and being wrong eleven times teaches a nervous system something it does not unlearn on a Monday.

That adaptation kept you upright. It was not a flaw. It was the thing that got you here.

And it does not switch off because a contract was signed. The part of you that stopped expecting is still on duty, still scanning, 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 man who spent nine years learning not to hope, and He is not annoyed at how long the learning takes to undo.

What nobody gets to say

I am not going to tell you it was worth it.

That judgement is yours alone. Nobody else in the world has standing to make it, and every person who has told you this month that it all worked out in the end has taken a decision that belongs to you and made it on your behalf in a sentence.

The nine years were real. Three of them were genuinely bad. A good outcome does not retroactively repaint them, and you are not required to file them as an investment that matured.

You are allowed to hold the job and the cost at the same time. Scripture never asks a person to call their own suffering good, Job 3:1-3, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to produce gratitude on demand before He will keep working in him.

Gladness will come or it will come slowly. Either way it is not a tax you owe on the desk.

The gap between the news and the body

There is a lag, and it is normal, and almost nobody warns anybody about it.

The mind gets the news in an afternoon. The body has been braced for nine years and takes considerably longer to be told. That is why you can solve something before lunch and sit in a car afterwards feeling nothing. The bracing has not been dismissed yet. Nobody has told it that it can stand down.

So do not read the numbness as ingratitude. It is not. It is a man whose guard has been up so long that lowering it is going to be a process rather than a decision.

You are not required to feel this before it is real. Scripture says the Lord hath done great things for us, and puts that in the mouth of people still walking around like dreamers, Psalm 126:3, and the Holy Spirit is the one who eventually turns the light back on in the room where it has been off.