The Girl Who Was Told Not to Bother

She was nine and she had said she wanted to be a teacher.

It was at a table with her aunt and two other women and a plate of something, and the aunt said, kindly, in the voice adults use when they are letting a child down softly about the world, that there would not be time for that. That it would all be over before she was grown. That the sensible thing was to think about the Lord and not about a career.

Nobody contradicted her. Two other adults at that table heard it and let it stand.

She is eighty one. She was a teacher for thirty four years.

And she has never once, in seventy two years, been able to enjoy that without a small companion feeling arriving alongside it. Not shame exactly. Something more like being caught out. As though she went ahead and had a life anyway, against advice, and got away with it, and the getting away with it is not entirely respectable.

She has never said this to anybody. It sounds absurd. She knows how it sounds. She taught two generations of children in that town and there is a bench with her name on it outside the primary school, and she cannot look at the bench without the feeling arriving.

The aunt died a long time ago and was a good woman and would be horrified.

Sit down at the table. There is a verse about numbering days that has been read to her the wrong way round her whole life.

Numbering days is an instruction to live them

Here it is, and it is almost always quoted with a somber face, which is a misreading.

So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.Psalm 90:12

Read the purpose clause. That we may get a heart of wisdom. The numbering is not there to make anybody morbid, and it is not there to stop anybody planning. It is there so that a person handles the days they have with sense.

A woman who knows her days are numbered and therefore trains as a teacher and gives thirty four years to the children of one town has obeyed that verse. She has not evaded it. She has done precisely the thing it asks.

You are inside that verse rather than outside it, and Psalm 90:12 was never a warning against making plans, and the Spirit inspired a psalm that ends by asking God to establish exactly the kind of work you did.

You did the wise thing rather than the disobedient thing. Psalm 90:12 asks for a heart of wisdom about a limited life, and the Spirit inspired that as an instruction to use the days rather than to decline them.

And notice the whole psalm around it. It is entirely realistic about how short a life is, and it ends by asking God to establish the work of our hands. Twice. That is a psalm about mortality that closes by asking for work to last, which is not the posture your aunt was describing.

And it is worth pausing on how strange that ending is if you were taught what you were taught. Establish the work of our hands upon us, yes, establish the work of our hands. Said twice, at the end of a psalm about how brief everything is. A person who genuinely believed there was no point building anything would not have written that line, let alone repeated it, and the Spirit inspired both halves of that psalm and did not think they were in tension.

What she was actually handed

Now the aunt, and this can be said with kindness because she deserves it.

She was passing on what she had been given. Somebody had told her, and she believed it, and she thought she was protecting a nine year old from disappointment. That is a loving intention producing a very expensive result, which happens constantly and is nobody's malice.

But look at what it actually was. A prediction, made confidently, at a table, to a child, about something nobody had been told.

And a prediction to a child does not stay a statement about the world. It becomes a statement about what is permitted, and children do not have a way to file it as an opinion, so it goes in as the shape of things.

You were not given guidance. You were given somebody's guess, and nothing written anywhere authorized it, and the Spirit was not behind a sentence that told a nine year old her life would not be needed.

Seventy two years of the wrong feeling

Here is the part that can actually be laid down.

The feeling of having got away with something has been sitting next to a good life for seventy two years, which is a very long time for a small companion.

Trace it and it has no legitimate parent. It is not guilt about anything you did. It is the residue of having crossed a line that was drawn by mistake by somebody who had no authority to draw it and who would be horrified.

That does not make it disappear. Things that go in at nine do not respond to being argued with. What can happen is that it gets named accurately, out loud, more than once, and named things lose a certain amount of their weight.

You are not a woman who went ahead against God. What is written asked for a heart of wisdom about a short life, and the Spirit is not the origin of the feeling that arrives when you look at that bench.

Go and look at the bench on purpose. Say one sentence out loud about who holds the day, and then say one about thirty four years of children. In that order.