The Sentence Turns On The Word Yet

Parking lot behind the building at ten past five, and the light has gone that color it goes in the late part of the year, so the whole row of cars looks better than it is.

Three of them standing at an open car door because one of them is looking for something and the other two are not in a hurry.

She is fifty-three.

Twenty-six years of the same work. Not glamorous work and never was. The kind where you are the reason something did not go wrong, which means nobody knows you did anything.

And an hour ago something happened that was nothing, a decision made in a meeting that undid four years of hers in about ninety seconds, and everybody was pleasant about it, and it was not personal, and it was probably correct.

She came out and got into her car and did not start it.

And she said, out loud, alone, in the car: I have spent my strength for nothing.

She heard herself say it. And she sat there afterward slightly frightened, because she is not a dramatic woman and she does not say things like that, and because saying it out loud made it a thing that had been said, and there is no taking a sentence like that back once it is in the air of a car.

If you have heard yourself say something like that, you know the silence afterward, and you know you have not told a single person you said it.

He said it first, and then he wrote the next word

Weigh it first and whole, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it is never shortened to reach it.

What this costs is not the meeting. It is twenty-six years suddenly having a total. It costs you the ordinary ability to not tally your own life, which is a mercy most people have without knowing it. It costs four years of specific work, in ninety seconds, by people being pleasant. It costs the drive home, which you will do on autopilot. And it costs you a sentence you said in your own voice in your own car, which you cannot unhear and have not repeated to anybody.

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 twenty-six years made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if what you said in the car has moved somewhere darker since, as far as thinking that nothing would be missing if you were not in that building at all, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the two at the open car door, 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 stand in a parking lot and are not in a hurry.

Now, Isaiah 49, and I want you to see that your sentence is in the Bible.

Then I said, I have laboured in vain, I have spent my strength for nought, and in vain: yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my work with my God.Isaiah 49:4

Read the first half again. I have spent my strength for nought.

That is your sentence. Not a paraphrase of it. The servant in Isaiah 49 says the exact thing you said in a car at ten past five, and God put it in the book, uncorrected, unedited, with no note attached explaining that he should not have felt that way.

You are quoting Scripture without knowing it, and God kept the line in. Isaiah 49:4 has the servant saying it in the first person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence from an old prophecy and lays it on a parking lot in the late part of the year.

Now the pivot, and it is one word. Yet.

Yet surely my judgment is with the LORD, and my work with my God.

He does not withdraw the first half. That is the thing to see. He does not say, on reflection, it was not really in vain. He lets both halves of the sentence stand, joined by a word that admits they are both true at once: it looks like nothing, and the assessment of it is not being made by anybody in that room.

You have a verdict that is filed somewhere other than the meeting you were in. That is written into Isaiah 49:4, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes the second half arrive without deleting the first.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because twenty-six years of well meant things have already been said in that building.

It does not tell you the four years produced something after all. It does not promise you a result, or a reversal, or a moment in ten years where somebody says they were wrong. I am not going to invent one, and I am not going to go through your twenty-six years looking for an achievement to hand you, because that is the same tallying with a friendlier total.

And it does not say the meeting was wrong. It was probably correct. That is allowed to be true here.

What it does is put your sentence in Scripture, with the word yet after it, and let both halves stand.

You were never asked to withdraw the first half in order to have the second. Scripture keeps both clauses in one verse, and the same Spirit who inspired it is the one who carries it to a woman who has not started her car.