They Told Me I Was Next

There is a version of being passed over that is much worse than the ordinary one, and hardly anybody can talk about it.

Picture the woman it happened to. Eighteen months ago, in a corridor, her manager said something that was not quite a promise and was very close to one.

He said: keep doing what you are doing, because when Marcus goes, that is yours.

She did not imagine it. She remembers where she was standing. She remembers that she said thank you and felt slightly embarrassed by how pleased she was.

And she did keep doing what she was doing. She took the difficult client. She covered two months of a colleague's leave. She said yes to the Thursday thing that nobody wanted.

Marcus went in March. The role went to somebody from another site.

And here is the specific trap she is now in.

If she had been told nothing, she would be disappointed, and disappointment is a thing a person can say out loud. But she was told something, and now if she mentions it she becomes a woman claiming she was promised a job, which sounds either delusional or grasping, and there is no way to say it that does not sound like one of those.

Her manager, meanwhile, has almost certainly forgotten saying it. Not maliciously. It was a warm remark in a corridor eighteen months ago, meant kindly at the time, and it cost him nothing to say and has cost her a year and a half of arranging her working life around it.

So she has lost the role, and lost the eighteen months, and lost the ability to describe either. That is three losses out of one corridor.

Hope deferred, and what it does to a body

There is a proverb about this exact condition, and what is remarkable is that it describes a physical effect rather than a moral one.

Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12, King James Version)

Maketh the heart sick.

That is not a warning against hoping. It is a diagnosis. The writer is saying that a hope which is raised and then postponed produces something like illness, and he says it as a matter of observed fact rather than as a rebuke.

Which means the woman in the corridor is not being weak, and she is not being greedy, and she has not lost her perspective. She has a condition that the wisdom literature identified and named several thousand years ago.

You have something with a name in Scripture, and Proverbs 13 calls hope deferred a sickness of the heart rather than a failure of character (Proverbs 13:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person take their own condition seriously without turning it into bitterness.

And notice the second half of the verse, because it is honest in a way people skip. When the desire cometh, it is a tree of life. The proverb does not say hoping is a mistake. It says a fulfilled hope is enormously good, which means the wanting was never the problem.

You were right to want it, and Proverbs 13:12 calls the arrival of a desire a tree of life rather than warning anybody off wanting (Proverbs 13:12), and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a disappointed person from concluding that the wanting was the error.

The wound from somebody familiar

There is a psalm line about who does this kind of damage, and it is precise about the difference.

For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it. (Psalm 55:12)

Not an enemy. He goes on to say it was a companion, somebody familiar, somebody he had walked with.

That is exactly why a corridor remark from a manager she likes is heavier than a formal rejection would have been. A rejection letter is from an institution. This was from a person.

You have been wounded by somebody familiar rather than by a process, and Psalm 55 says outright that this kind is harder to bear than an enemy would be (Psalm 55:12), and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a person name that accurately without deciding the man is a villain.

And there is a line in Lamentations about how somebody keeps going in the middle of a genuinely bad situation, and the mechanism in it is worth having.

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope. (Lamentations 3:21)

This I recall to my mind. It is a deliberate act of remembering something specific, done by a man in the worst book in the Bible, in order to produce hope on purpose rather than waiting for it to arrive.

You have a deliberate act available rather than only a feeling to wait for, and Lamentations 3 has a man recalling something to mind in order to have hope (Lamentations 3:21), and the Spirit of God is the one who supplies what gets recalled.

What this is not

Let me be plain, because this could easily curdle.

This is not saying she should raise it with him. She probably should not, and only she can judge that. He has forgotten, and being reminded would embarrass him, and an embarrassed manager is not a safe thing to create.

It is also not promising the next one. Nobody can promise that, and this article will not.

And it is not saying he lied. He almost certainly did not. He said a warm thing about a likely future in a corridor and the future did what futures do.

And plainly: if the heart sickness has become the kind that does not lift, if you cannot get out of bed, or if some part of you has begun wanting it all to stop, that is more than a job. 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. That is strength.

You are not being told to make a case to anybody, and Psalm 55 names the wound without instructing the wounded person to do anything about the man (Psalm 55:12), and the Holy Spirit is the one who deals with what she cannot say to anybody in that building.