Thirty, and a Cardboard Hat

The hat does not fit anybody. That is the first thing you notice in a room full of them, and it is somehow the only democratic thing about the afternoon.

Your name came up on the screen and you walked across and shook a hand and came off the other side, and it took eleven seconds, and it took nine years.

Twenty-one. That is the age of nearly everybody else in that row. Their parents are in the balcony and their parents are the age you are.

You have a photograph on your phone of you in the hat and you have looked at it four times since Thursday and you have not sent it to anybody.

Nine years. The year you had to stop. The two years of working and not studying at all. The restart that did not take. The three years part time, evenings, which is the stretch nobody who has not done it can imagine and which you can barely remember in detail because it was mostly just tired.

And in the hall on Thursday, with the organ going and everybody's parents clapping, you were not proud.

You were doing sums.

Moses asks God to match the gladness to the years

There is a request in Psalm 90 that most people never notice is a request.

O satisfy us early with thy mercy; that we may rejoice and be glad all our days. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil.Psalm 90:14-15

Make us glad according to the days. He is asking God to measure the gladness against the hard stretch. Not to explain it. Not to justify it. To match it.

And notice that Moses does not pretend the hard years were something else. He calls them days of affliction and years of seeing evil, in a prayer, out loud, to God, and God kept it in the book.

That is permission for what you were doing in that hall.

You are allowed to count in front of God and still be in the room. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture has Moses asking God to make him glad according to the days of affliction, Psalm 90:15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hold a hat and a sum at the same time.

Nobody else gets to call them worth it

Somebody will say it this month. They will say it warmly and they will mean it entirely well. It was all worth it in the end.

And something in you will go still, and you will agree out loud, and you will not be able to explain why it sat wrong.

Here is why. That judgement is yours. It belongs to the woman who did three years of evenings, and to nobody else, and when a person says it on your behalf they have taken the only thing those nine years left in your hands, which is the right to say what they were.

So I am not going to say it. I do not know. Neither does anybody in that balcony.

You are the only one with standing to weigh those nine years, and you may take as long as you like. Scripture lets Moses name years of affliction without anybody correcting him, Psalm 90:15, and the Holy Spirit has never once demanded a summary before He would comfort somebody.

The degree is not a payment

Here is the sum that had you distracted through the whole ceremony.

You have started treating the certificate as a settlement. Nine years in one column, eleven seconds and a handshake in the other, books balanced, everybody may now move on.

That is not what happened. The nine years were not installments and Thursday was 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 every good gift and every perfect gift is from above and cometh down from the Father of lights, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a person a degree as a receipt for what it cost.

Why the sums came now

And there is a plain reason it arrived on Thursday and not before.

For nine years you could not afford to feel it. There were shifts and there were essays and there was a restart that did not take, and stopping to feel the shape of the whole thing would have cost you the momentum you needed to keep going.

So it waited. That is what a person does. It gets put down somewhere findable and the week gets on with itself, and then one day the pressure comes off in a hall with an organ playing and everything that was put down is sitting in the row beside you.

That is not ingratitude. It is a woman finally having room.

You are whole now, on this side of it, whatever Thursday afternoon felt like. Scripture says He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit does that at His own pace and not at the pace of a ceremony.