Four Years In, One Email

It arrives at twenty to four on a Tuesday and it is four paragraphs long.

The first paragraph thanks him. The second one uses the words difficult decision. The third one is the one with the actual information in it, and the fourth one wishes him well and mentions that the department is happy to talk.

He reads it. Then he reads it again, more slowly, which is a strange thing to do because nothing in it is unclear. He is not checking whether he understood. He is checking whether there is a different sentence in there that he missed the first time.

There is not.

He sits back. On the screen behind the email is the folder. Nine hundred and something files, four years deep, with the naming system he invented in the first month and has kept perfectly ever since, which now strikes him as slightly ridiculous. There is a spreadsheet with a cell in it that took him nine weeks to be able to fill in. There is an outline with headings and no chapters yet. There is a subfolder of photographs of a whiteboard.

There is a flight booked for a conference in March, and a hotel with free cancellation until the twentieth.

Out in the corridor the kettle clicks off and two people are talking about a soccer game, and one of them says he had it on in the background and missed the goal anyway, and they both laugh.

He puts his hands flat on the desk either side of the laptop and does not move for a while.

You know this. Maybe it was not an email. Maybe it was a phone call, or a scan, or a sentence somebody said in a kitchen that could not be taken back afterward. Maybe it was four years and maybe it was fourteen. What matters is that this morning there was a road with your name on it going out five years, and this afternoon there is not, and the difference took one conversation.

Two things before anything else, and I would say them to your face.

I am not going to explain this to you. I do not know why the money went or the door closed or the sentence got said. I have no reason to give you, and a reason handed over on the day it happened is not comfort, it is a way of ending the conversation early.

And I am not going to tell you that something better is coming. I do not know that either. Nobody who tells you that on a Tuesday afternoon knows it, and you can feel that they do not, which is why it lands the way it does.

What I have is smaller and it is much older, and it does not depend on knowing what happens next.

Seen before there was anything to see

David writes the line in the middle of a psalm about being followed everywhere, and it is worth noticing that he does not sound comfortable for most of it. He is a man discovering there is nowhere in creation he can go and be unaccompanied, and he is not sure at first whether that is good news.

Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.Psalm 139:16

Read what it actually claims. The seeing came first. Before the substance was formed, before there was anything with edges on it to be looked at, the looking had already started.

You are seen at twenty to four on a Tuesday by a God who was looking before there was anything of you to look at. That is not a comforting thought I am adding. Psalm 139:16 puts His attention earlier than the material it attends to, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an ancient line about the unformed and makes it land on a man staring at a folder.

Notice too what the psalm is not doing. It is not handing David a schedule. It does not give him the plot. Nowhere in it does he receive an explanation of a single day, and he is not written as a man who has one and is at peace about it.

You were known before the first day of the four years, and you are known just as exactly on the day they stopped. What is written puts the knowledge of a person outside of time altogether, which means it never once ran through a funding cycle, and His Spirit is the one who makes that felt rather than merely believed.

You have not fallen out of the book you were written into, and nothing that arrived in an inbox is capable of taking a name out of it. The written word describes the days as recorded rather than as earned, and the Spirit of God is the seal on a person's belonging rather than their record of achievement.

What the psalm does not say

Here is where I have to be careful, and I want you to hear the care.

This verse is sometimes handed to people on a day like today with a twist in it: your days were written, therefore this day was written, therefore this was meant, therefore be at peace. I am not going to do that to you. The psalm says the days were seen. It does not say what they contain, it does not say who authored the email, and it certainly does not say the loss was arranged for your improvement.

You are held by Someone who did not learn about this at twenty to four. That is a claim about His knowledge and not about His authorship, and it is exactly as far as Psalm 139:16 goes; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes the difference between those two land as relief rather than as an argument.

There is real comfort in that, and it is worth naming precisely. Not that this was designed. That He was not caught out. That there is no version of this afternoon in which He is behind, or scrambling, or dealing with an outcome He had not accounted for.

You have a keeping that never once ran through the plan that ended today. Scripture ties His hold on a person to His own faithfulness rather than to their trajectory, and His Spirit is the one who holds a man steady in the exact hour the trajectory stops.