The Letter At Fifty-Three

It came in an envelope with a window in it, which Beverley thought at the time was almost funny.

Twenty-two years. She had trained probably sixty people over that period and four of them were now in jobs above the one she was being let go from, which is a sentence she has said out loud exactly once, to her sister, and regretted.

Nothing she did. She wants that understood and so do I. There was a reorganization and there was a formula and the formula produced her name along with a number of other people's, and the woman who had to tell her had clearly not slept.

She is fifty-five now. It was two years ago in November.

And here is the fire, and it is not the money, which is tight but manageable, and it is not the pride, which she got over faster than she expected.

It is that she has a great deal left in her and nowhere to put it.

That is the thing nobody has a word for. She is not finished. She was not slowing down. She was, if anything, better at it at fifty-three than she had been at forty because she had finally stopped worrying about being liked. And all of that capacity is still sitting there, fully loaded, in a woman who now has a great deal of time.

She has applied. Of course she has applied. She has had two interviews in twenty months and she knows exactly what happened in both of them and it is not something anybody would ever put in writing.

She volunteers on a Wednesday and it is genuinely good and it is about a fifth of what she has.

And the sentence that arrives, always in the afternoon, which is when she used to be busiest, is this.

Nobody asked me whether I was done. And I am in this on my own.

You may know that afternoon.

Maybe yours was a letter, or a restructure, or a body that made the decision, or a role that quietly stopped being offered to you. And you had a great deal left.

What I am not going to say

Let me clear the hall.

I am not going to tell you God closed that door. I do not believe it, I will not write it, and if somebody has said it to you, you may put it down this afternoon.

I am not going to tell you there is something better coming. I do not know. Nobody knows, and being told it at fifty-five by somebody who is not looking for work is not the encouragement people imagine it is.

I am not going to ask what you are meant to be learning. Not one word.

I am not going to suggest you retrain, or update anything, or that this is an opportunity in disguise. If it were an opportunity you would have been asked whether you wanted it.

And I am not going to imply, in any form, that more faith would have kept the letter out of the envelope. That is not true and I will not put it on you.

One thing.

Whose hands the timing is in

There is a half verse in a psalm written by a man being hunted, and it is five words long and it does not solve anything.

My times are in thy hand.Psalm 31:15

Times. Not outcome. Not employment. The seasons, the when, the length of things.

And notice that David says it in the middle of a psalm where the situation has not improved. He says it in verse fifteen and he is still in trouble in verse seventeen. It is not a sentence spoken from the far side of a rescue; it is a sentence spoken by a man in the middle of one with no visible end.

Which is why it is worth anything at all.

And the timing of this is in hands that are not the formula's. The written word puts the times in His hand in the middle of an unresolved situation, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman at three in the afternoon with nothing on.

And you are not being timed out by anybody with a spreadsheet. The word gives the seasons to Him rather than to circumstance, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than confirming a redundancy calculation.

The capacity you are still carrying

Now let me say something about what is actually burning, because I do not think it is idleness.

You are still carrying it. That is the difficulty. Twenty-two years of skill did not leave when the pass did. It is all still there, every hour of it, in a woman with a Wednesday.

And carrying something you cannot set down anywhere is a specific weight, and it is heavier than having nothing, and nobody who has not done it understands why.

I am not going to tell you where to put it, because I do not know your town or your situation and I am not going to invent a plan for your life from here.

What I will say is that the capacity is not evidence of waste. It is evidence of capacity, and it is intact, and its being unused this month is not a verdict on it or on you.

And what is in you did not leave when the letter came. The word says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, and the Spirit is the one who makes without repentance mean not withdrawn.

And nothing about you is under review. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has quietly wondered what she should have done differently at forty-eight.