I Was Good At This Before He Came

Here is something that happens to people and almost nobody names, because it happens to the part of you that would have noticed.

Picture a man of forty four. He has done this job for eleven years. For the first nine of them he was, by any measure anybody could name, good at it. He knew it. It was not arrogance, it was just a settled fact he did not think about, the way a man does not think about whether he can drive.

Then a new manager arrived, and for two years now nothing has been quite right.

And here is the strange part. If you asked him today whether he is good at his job, he would not say no. He would say something worse. He would say he is not sure, and then he would say he has probably always struggled with this part, and he would mean it.

He has lost his own history. Not the facts. He could still tell you about the year he ran the second site, and the project he pulled out of a fire in a week, and the two people he trained who both got promoted past him and both still ring him for advice.

He has the facts. He has lost the ability to read them as being about himself.

That is the specific injury and it is worth naming precisely. Two years of small corrections has not made him worse at the job. It has rewritten his account of the nine years before it. He now remembers his own past as a series of near misses that he got away with.

And nobody around him knows. His wife has noticed he does not talk about work the way he used to, and she cannot get further than that, because he cannot either.

Remembering is described as work

There is a psalm where a man is in exactly this condition, and what is remarkable about it is how mechanical his response is.

He is in a bad stretch. He says his soul refused to be comforted. He says he is so troubled that he cannot speak. This is not a man having a mildly discouraging week.

And then he does something deliberate.

I will remember the works of the LORD: surely I will remember thy wonders of old. (Psalm 77:11, King James Version)

I will remember. Twice, in one verse. That is not a feeling arriving. That is a decision being made and then reinforced, by somebody who explicitly cannot feel anything encouraging at that moment.

You are permitted to remember on purpose rather than waiting to feel differently, and Psalm 77 has a man deciding to remember while still saying his soul refuses comfort (Psalm 77:11), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old record readable again to somebody who has lost the reading of it.

And notice what he reaches for a few verses earlier.

I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient times. (Psalm 77:5)

The years. Plural, and specific. He is not reaching for a general sense that things were once better. He is going back to particular stretches of time.

You have particular years available to you and not merely a vague better past, and Psalm 77:5 says the days of old and the years of ancient times in those exact terms, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps the details from being written over by two recent ones.

Stones so that a story cannot be lost

There is a moment in Joshua that is entirely about this problem, and the solution given is physical.

A generation crosses a river in a way they will never be able to explain properly to their children. And God tells them to take twelve stones out of the riverbed and stack them on the bank.

That this may be a sign among you, that when your children ask their fathers in time to come, saying, What mean ye by these stones? (Joshua 4:6)

The stones do not do anything. They are not magic and they are not an altar. They are there so that a question gets asked and a story gets told, because God evidently considered it likely that a people would forget something enormous within one generation.

If a nation can lose a river crossing in forty years, a man can lose nine good years in two.

You have not failed at something everybody else manages, and Joshua 4 has God building a memory aid into the landscape because forgetting was expected (Joshua 4:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the same work in a life, usually through something as ordinary as a person saying a true thing out loud.

And notice that the stones were for the children, but they were stacked by the men who had crossed. The remembering was the job of the ones who were there.

You were there for those nine years and the account belongs to you, and Joshua 4:6 hands the stacking to the ones who did the crossing (Joshua 4:6), and the Spirit of God is the one who prompts a man to put a stone down where he can see it.

What this is not

Let me be plain about the boundaries, because this could go wrong.

This is not telling anybody to argue with their manager about their record. That is a conversation with a cost only the reader can see, and no article should be spending somebody else's money.

It is also not saying he is above criticism. Some of the corrections may have been fair. A man can be genuinely weaker at something and still not be what two years of remarks have made him into.

And it is not nostalgia. This is not about wishing the old manager back or believing the past was perfect. It is about a record being read accurately rather than through the filter of the last two years.

And plainly: if the fog has spread past work, if you have begun to believe you are no good at anything, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has started wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a manager. Call or text the 988 crisis line, and say the true version out loud to a doctor or a counselor or a pastor you trust. There is no faith in doing that alone.

You are not being asked to talk yourself into anything, and Psalm 77 has the man handling actual events rather than manufacturing a better mood (Psalm 77:11), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes real history do the work that positive thinking cannot.