Different By Forty

She wrote it down in February and she has not looked at the page since, and she knows exactly what is on it.

Four things, and one of them she would not say out loud to a person. Not a resolution list, she is too old for those, and she would tell you she does not do them. It is more of a hope, written down, with a date on it, and the date is her fortieth in November.

By November, she would like to be a woman who does not do a particular thing when she is frightened.

It is a good want. There is nothing wrong with the four things and they are not vain and nobody is being harmed by her wanting them.

And in June she was clearing out a drawer and she found a notebook from ten years ago, and in the front of it, in her own handwriting, was a list with a date on it.

The date was her thirtieth.

Three of the four things are the same. Not similar. The same, in almost the same words, and one of them is worded slightly better in the older version, which she found the hardest part of the whole afternoon.

She sat on the floor of that room with a notebook in her hand for a while.

And what arrived, and has not left since June, is not despair exactly. It is quieter. It is the suspicion that she has spent a decade doing the same thing, which is setting a date and then arriving at the date, and that November is going to come and go the way thirty did, and that at fifty she will find this notebook again.

The psalm asks to number days, not to hurry them

Let me be careful with the four things first, because they are good and they are not the problem.

Wanting to be a woman who does not do that particular thing when she is frightened is a real and honorable want. It came from somewhere true. Nobody here is going to tell you to stop wanting it or to make peace with something you were right to want to be free of.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as consolation: the deadline was never yours to set, and its failure is not a report on you. That is not my kind reading of a bad afternoon on a floor, it is what stands written in the ninetieth Psalm, which is a psalm about the shortness of a life and asks for something other than speed, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired it was in that room with you in June.

Read what the psalmist asks for, given what he has just spent eleven verses saying.

Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.Psalm 90:12

He has just said that a life is seventy years, or eighty if you have the strength, and that it passes quickly. Everything in that psalm is about time running out, and that is what is written, and the Holy Spirit put it in a songbook rather than in a warning.

And what he asks for is not more speed. He does not ask to be finished sooner. He asks to be taught to count, and what he expects to gain from counting is wisdom, which is the slowest thing there is.

So this is yours right now rather than pending November: you are inside a work that is not measured against a birthday, because the written word takes the shortness of a life and asks for wisdom rather than haste, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the work at a pace He has not published.

Now let me say what the notebook on the floor actually showed you, because you read it as ten wasted years and it was not.

Three of the four are the same. You noticed the sameness. You did not notice that a woman who wants the same four things at thirty and at forty is a woman who has been consistent about what matters for a decade, which is rarer than you think and is not nothing.

And there is a thing in that notebook you are not counting because it is not on the list. The reason one of them is worded better in the old version is that you were closer to the pain of it then. You are further from it now. That is not a failure to change, it is a change, and it is the kind that only shows up when somebody hands you your own handwriting from ten years ago.

What is written says He who began a good work carries it on, and the Holy Spirit does not stop and restart at birthdays.

And the guard, and it matters here more than anywhere: nothing in this is telling you that a slower pace is holier, or that wanting to be different fast is shallow. Some things change quickly and thank God for them. What is being taken off you is the date, not the want.