He Names Stars And I Am Not A Star

The backyard is small and there is a fence and beyond the fence a hedge somebody else is responsible for, and above all of it, at this time of year, the first stars turn up at about twenty past nine.

Two blankets and four people. Her brother's kids are lying flat because that is the correct way. Somebody has brought out the tea in the wrong mugs.

Twenty-nine.

She finished her training and worked for eleven months and then it started, and there is no version of the sentence that makes eleven months into a career.

Her friends from that year are four years in now. She sees it. She is glad. She is genuinely, uncomplicatedly glad about most of it, which surprises people.

But at twenty past nine, lying on a blanket while a seven year old points out the one that is not a star and is a plane, she has the thought that always comes out here and never comes indoors.

The universe is very large and full of enormous things with names on them, and she is a person who did eleven months of work and then stopped, and if you were making a list of what is in the world, she would not be on it. Not out of self-pity. Out of scale.

If you have looked up and felt the arithmetic of scale, you know it is not sadness, and you know it does not arrive when there is a ceiling over you.

Read the next verse

The weight first, and at full size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it is never shortened.

What this costs is not the job. It is a story with no shape. It costs you the ordinary human structure of a working life, which is what people build a self-description out of and which you cannot use. It costs the eleven months, which were good and which are too short to say out loud. It costs you the answer to what do you do, forever. And it costs you a thought at twenty past nine, on your back, on a blanket, in which you do the arithmetic of scale and come out not on the list.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your four years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the scale thought has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking nothing at all would be missing from the list if you were not on the blanket, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your brother, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who bring the tea out in the wrong mugs.

Now, Psalm 147, and read the famous verse and then keep going, which almost nobody does.

He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names. Great is our Lord, and of great power: his understanding is infinite. The LORD lifteth up the meek: he casteth the wicked down to the ground.Psalm 147:4-6

Verse four is the one on the posters. He names the stars.

Verse six is the one nobody quotes. The LORD lifteth up the meek.

They are three lines apart, in one poem, by one writer, who put them there in that order deliberately. The naming of a hundred billion objects, and then, without any transition at all, the lifting up of the people nobody would put on a list.

That is not an accident of editing. That is the psalm's entire argument: the same attention that indexes the stars is the attention that goes under somebody who has nothing to point at.

You are in verse six and it is in the same paragraph as the stars. Psalm 147:6 puts the lifting of the meek three lines from the naming of the stars, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a poem you have half read and shows you the rest of it.

Now, the word meek, because it is not what people think. It does not mean timid and it does not mean nice. In that vocabulary it means the ones with no leverage. The people who cannot make anything happen. It is a word about position rather than personality.

You have a place in the psalm that is given by position rather than earned by output. That is written into Psalm 147:6, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes an ancient word for having no leverage land on a blanket at twenty past nine.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because four years of good sentences have already been said in that backyard.

It does not tell you the career is coming. It makes no promise about your body or the next four years, and I will not make one, because what God does there is His, in His own way, and anybody confident about somebody else's illness is being confident about themselves.

And it does not tell you that you are secretly significant, and I am not going to look through your eleven months for something to point at, because that is the same list with your name added at the bottom, and the list was the problem.

You were never required to be an item in order to be lifted. Scripture puts the meek and the stars in one poem, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries it into a small backyard.