She Left And I Smiled And Went Back In

There is a specific afternoon that a great many people have had, and almost nobody has described it out loud.

Picture the woman standing in the corridor. There is a card going around. There is a cake with the wrong kind of icing on it. There is a woman of about her age who has just resigned to do something else, and who is glowing.

She signs the card. She writes something warm and true, because she means it. She hugs her at four o'clock and says she is so pleased for her, and she is.

And then she goes back to her desk, and there are two hours left of the day, and something in her chest has gone cold.

Because a door just opened in front of her, in the same building, in the same week, for a person doing the same job, and she watched it open and she did not go through it. She cannot go through it. Her mortgage and her mother and her son's therapy are all standing in the doorway.

And on that afternoon her staying stops being a private arrangement and becomes a comparison.

That is the thing that actually happened, and it is worth naming precisely. Nothing about her situation changed at four o'clock. The same money, the same reasons, the same three people depending on it. What changed is that somebody else's leaving put her own staying on a scale, and now she has to answer a question that she was never asked to answer before: what does it say about me that I am still here?

And nobody can help her with that, because it would be a strange thing to raise. Everybody is genuinely pleased about the leaving card, including her.

The question Peter asked, and the answer

There is an exchange at the very end of John that speaks directly into this, and the answer Jesus gives is close to blunt.

Peter has just been told what his own road is going to be, and it is a hard one. And immediately he does the thing every human being does. He looks at the man standing nearby.

Peter seeing him saith to Jesus, Lord, and what shall this man do? (John 21:21, King James Version)

What about him. That is the whole question, and it arrives about four seconds after his own road has been described to him.

And here is the answer.

Jesus saith unto him, If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee? follow thou me. (John 21:22)

What is that to thee. That is not gentle. It is not unkind either, but it is not soft.

He is not told that comparison is a sin. He is told that the other man's road is genuinely not information about his own.

You are not being given somebody else's road as data about yours, and John 21 answers a comparison with what is that to thee rather than with an explanation (John 21:22), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land as freedom rather than as a rebuke.

And notice the two words at the end, which are the whole answer. Follow thou me. The emphasis in the Greek is on the word thou. You, specifically, as distinct from him.

You have your own road named and pointed at, and John 21:22 ends by putting the emphasis on the person being spoken to rather than on the one being compared to (John 21:22), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a person on their own road on the afternoon somebody else takes a different one.

Every man shall bear his own burden

There is a line in Galatians that looks like a contradiction until you read the verse above it, and the pair together are exactly right for this.

Two verses earlier Paul says to bear one another's burdens. Then he says this.

For every man shall bear his own burden. (Galatians 6:5)

The words are different in the original. The first is a crushing weight that people help each other carry. The second is a soldier's pack, the load assigned to one person for their own march.

Which means there is a kind of weight that is genuinely yours, that nobody else can carry and nobody else has been given, and it is not a punishment. It is an assignment.

You have a pack that was issued to you rather than a weight you failed to put down, and Galatians 6 distinguishes the shared burden from the personal one in two verses (Galatians 6:5), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that difference feel like dignity rather than like a sentence.

And the verse just before it is worth having as well.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.

Not in another. The gladness is not supposed to be routed through a comparison in either direction.

You are permitted to be glad without a comparison in it, and Galatians 6 says the rejoicing is in himself alone and not in another (Galatians 6:5), and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies gladness that does not need anybody else to have less.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could easily do harm.

This is not saying she should not have felt anything. She should have. Watching a door open and knowing you cannot go through it is a real loss and it deserves to be felt.

It is also not saying the friend was wrong to leave. She was not. Her situation was her situation and she should go with everybody's blessing, which is exactly what she got.

And it is not saying that a person in this position should stop wanting out. Wanting out is not disloyalty to your own family.

And plainly: if that afternoon has become a settled belief that your life is over, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is bigger than a leaving card. 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. Getting help is strength.

You are not being told to feel nothing about it, and John 21 answers the comparison without ever telling Peter that he should not have looked (John 21:22), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets an ache be real and lets it be finished.