Open Hands · Week 2 · Monday · ANXIETY
They gave her a new badge on her first day back. Same company, same building, new number, because the old one had been closed out somewhere in the months she was gone.
She had been away a long time, for reasons that were not optional, and the work had continued without her. Nobody was unkind about it. Two people told her to take her time and meant it.
By Thursday of the first week she had a scoreboard running in her head: what she used to get through in a day, against what she got through today. The gap was not small. She did not stop keeping score. She simply stopped saying the number out loud, which is not the same thing.
I am not saying this out of need, for I have learned to be content regardless of my circumstances.Philippians 4:11 (BSB)
Learned Is the Word
That verse gets quoted as though contentment were a personality trait some people are issued at birth. Paul does not say that. He says learned.
Learned is what you do badly at first. Learned takes a period of time in which you were not yet any good at it. Whatever Paul has, he did not have it at the start, and he is telling us so in the same breath that he tells us he has it.
I know how to live humbly, and I know how to abound. In any and every situation I have learned the secret of being filled and being hungry, of having plenty and having need.Philippians 4:12 (BSB)
Notice what he is not claiming. He is not saying the seasons feel the same. Hungry and filled are not the same, and he does not pretend otherwise. What he has learned is how to be in the one he is actually in.
She was working full-strength hours against half-strength capacity and calling the difference a character flaw.
What It Cost
She asked her manager for twenty minutes.
And then she said the thing out loud — not that she needed more time, not that she was easing back in, but plainly what she can carry right now. Not what she used to carry. Not what she intends to carry by spring. What she can carry now.
She said it was the most exposed twenty minutes she has had in her working life. She was certain she was handing someone a reason to doubt her.
What she got back was a smaller piece of work than she wanted. Visibly smaller. She noticed who else got the thing she would have had a year ago, and she went home and sat in the car for a while before she went inside.
Here is the part she did not expect. She finished it. On time, done properly, nothing left ragged — the first thing she has finished on time since she came back. Not because the work was easy. Because for the first time it was sized to the season she is actually in.
The scoreboard is still there. She says it is quieter. She also says she is not sure it will ever be gone, and I believe her, and I do not think that is a failure.
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