Open Hands · Week 2 · Wednesday · ANXIETY
Four invitations came this year. He went to all four, and he was genuinely glad at all four, and he did math in the car on the way home from all four.
He is twenty-five. The people he graduated with are getting married, buying first houses, posting the announcement with the ring or the keys or the ultrasound. He lives in an apartment he meant to be temporary and works a job he took as a first job and fully intended to have left by now.
Here is the thing worth stopping on: nobody handed him the schedule he is behind on. He built it himself, years ago, out of what it looked like other people were doing. Then he forgot he had built it, and started treating it as the way life is supposed to go.
But I trust in You, O LORD; I say, “You are my God.”Psalm 31:14 (BSB)
My times are in Your hands; deliver me from my enemies and from those who pursue me.Psalm 31:15 (BSB)
Times, Plural
Not my time, as in how long I have got. My times — which times, in what order, beginning when. The seasons themselves, and the sequence they come in.
And they are in His hands, which is the same as saying they are not in mine. Depending on the day, that is either the most frustrating sentence in the psalm or the most freeing one, and I think most of us have had both days.
Notice too who the psalmist is asking to be delivered from. Not from his circumstances. From those pursuing him. He is being chased, and he says his times belong to God in the same breath. He is not describing a solved life. He is describing where he has decided the calendar is kept.
He was not behind. He was on a different schedule than the one he had drawn up at nineteen.
What It Cost
He stayed in the job.
Not forever, and not out of resignation. For now — because when he was honest with himself about why he had planned to leave this spring, the reason was not the work. The reason was having a better answer at the next wedding.
That is a real cost, and I do not want to dress it up as wisdom. There is a version of this year where he makes a move, and it might have been a good one, and he will not now find out. He chose not to make a decision that was being made by a scoreboard.
The tell was always the timing. He did not want to leave on a Tuesday when the work was dull. He wanted to have left before October, when the next invitation lands. A decision timed to an audience is not a decision about the work.
He is still in the apartment. He is still going to the weddings, still glad at them, still doing a little math on the drive home. The math is quieter now, he says, and he has stopped calling it being behind.
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