Thirty Years, And Now I Have To Explain Them

There is a question that gets asked at family gatherings, always kindly, always by somebody younger, and it functions as an audit whether or not it was meant as one.

Why did you never do anything else?

Picture the woman being asked it. She is sixty one. She has worked in the same place since she was thirty. The person asking is a niece of about twenty six who has already had three careers and means nothing but interest by it.

And the woman says something short and pleasant and changes the subject, because the true answer is about eleven minutes long and no gathering has room for it.

Here is the true answer.

She stayed because in the second year her husband's back went and never came right. She stayed because the money was steady and steady was the only thing they had. She stayed through her mother's illness because she could get to the hospital in twelve minutes from that building. She stayed when the boy was struggling because the hours meant she was home at four. She stayed in the bad stretch because if she had gone they would have lost the house, and she has done the arithmetic on that year more times than anybody knows.

Not one of those was a failure to leave. Every single one was a decision, made deliberately, at a cost, in favor of specific people.

And she has never said any of that out loud in one piece, which means that in the story her family tells, and increasingly in the story she tells herself, thirty one years is a blank. It is the part where nothing happened.

That is what needs correcting. Not the question. The blank.

The words that got kept in full

There is a speech in Ruth that everybody has heard at weddings and almost nobody reads as being about a hard practical decision.

A woman with no money and no prospects tells her daughter in law to go home, twice, sensibly. And the younger woman refuses, and here is what she says.

And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. (Ruth 1:16, King James Version)

Now look at what she is actually choosing. She is choosing poverty, a foreign country, no husband, no children, and gleaning in somebody else's field for grain.

Nobody in that story tells her she has made an inspiring choice. Her mother in law spends the next chapter describing herself as empty and bitter, and the two of them go and live hard.

And the speech is preserved word for word, three thousand years later, because somebody understood that a hard decision made for a person is worth more than an easy one made for a plan.

You are making the kind of decision Scripture kept in full, and Ruth 1 preserves the whole speech rather than summarizing it (Ruth 1:16), and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept those words in the book for people who would need them.

And look at the verse just after it.

When she saw that she was stedfastly minded to go with her, then she left speaking unto her. (Ruth 1:18)

She left speaking. Naomi stopped arguing, because the decision was settled and it was not a mistake.

You have a decision that is allowed to be settled, and Ruth 1:18 has the arguing stop rather than continuing (Ruth 1:18), and the Spirit of God is the one who settles a question a person has been quietly reopening for thirty years.

Abide in the same calling

There is a line in Corinthians about staying put that has been misused badly and is worth reading carefully.

Let every man abide in the same calling wherein he was called. (1 Corinthians 7:20)

That is not an instruction never to change a job. Paul says in the same passage that if a person can become free, they should take it, so it plainly is not a rule against moving.

What it is doing is answering a question people were asking, which is whether becoming a Christian required them to change their circumstances in order to be legitimate.

The answer is no. The ordinary place a person is standing in is a real place to be a believer, without needing to be exchanged for a better story.

You are standing in a legitimate place rather than in a waiting room, and 1 Corinthians 7 says a person may abide where they were when they were called (1 Corinthians 7:20), and it is the Holy Spirit who removes the sense that a life has to be rearranged before it counts.

You have not been living an unfinished version of a life, and 1 Corinthians 7:20 treats an ordinary situation as a place to abide rather than as a place to escape (1 Corinthians 7:20), and the Spirit of God is the one who dignifies thirty one years in one building.

What this is not

Let me be careful here, because this could become a wall.

This is not saying that nobody should ever move, or that staying is automatically noble. Some long stays are genuinely fear, and a person is allowed to look at that honestly with somebody they trust.

It is also not saying the niece was rude. She was not. She asked an interested question and had no idea what was underneath it.

And it is not saying a person should now deliver the eleven minute answer at Christmas. That is not what this is for.

And plainly: if the years have begun to feel like a life that never happened, 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 job history. 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. Asking at sixty one is not too late and never was.

You are not being asked to defend anything to anybody, and Ruth 1 has the arguing stop rather than the decision being justified further (Ruth 1:18), and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles it inside a person whether or not it is ever explained at a table.