Eleven Days Until the Job Ends

Twenty past one in the morning, and Sandra is at the kitchen table with the calendar down off the wall in front of her.

It is the free one from the garage, the one with the tire offers on it, and she has circled the date in blue biro so hard that the pen has gone through into September. She counted the squares again about forty minutes ago. Eleven. She knows it is eleven. She counts them anyway, most nights, the way you press a bruise.

The laptop is closed now. Twenty-two applications since the announcement. Three replies. Two of those were the automatic kind and one was a real person being kind about it, which was somehow worse. There is a tab still open behind the lid about retraining, and another one she does not want to talk about.

She has been very good about this. That is the phrase her sister used, and it is true, and it is also the problem. She has been good about it at work, where she has kept the handover notes tidy for the people who are staying. She has been good about it with her son, who is fourteen and has worked out something is wrong and has started being helpful in a way that breaks her heart. She has been good about it at church, where she says it is in hand.

At twenty past one in the morning she is not good about it.

At twenty past one she does the thing she does, which is to run the numbers forward past the eleven squares into a country she has never visited and cannot afford the ticket to, and every night that country gets a little more detailed. She can see the letter about the rent. She can see her son's face. She has built the whole thing so many times now that it feels less like worrying and more like remembering.

And you know exactly what I am describing, because your calendar has a date circled on it too.

You know the arithmetic that will not come out. You know what it is to be told to trust God by somebody whose last day is not on a calendar. You know how the ordinary things have gone strange, how you notice the price of everything now, how you have started saying we are fine in a voice that does not sound like yours.

Eleven days. And nothing has come in behind it.

And the worst of it, the thing you have not said out loud to anyone, is not even the money.

It is the growing suspicion that you have been forgotten.

Look at how small the promise is

I want to hand you the verse, and then I want to show you what it actually says, because this is a place where people get handed something much bigger than the text and it does not hold their weight.

I have been young, and now am old, yet I have not seen the righteous forsaken, or his children begging for bread.Psalm 37:25

Now watch what an old man does and does not claim.

He does not say he has never seen a good person in trouble. He has. He wrote a whole book about it. He does not say faith puts a floor under your income, or that the righteous get a soft landing, or that if the eleven days run out you did something wrong. Nothing of the kind is in the line, and anybody who has put it there has added to it.

He says two things, and they are both small and both enormous.

The first is forsaken. Left. Abandoned. Walked away from by a God who lost interest or ran out of patience. Sixty or seventy years of watching, in a hard country, in hard centuries, and he has not once seen it happen. That is the claim. Not that trouble does not come. That you are not left in it. Psalm 37:25 is one old man's whole lifetime written down in a single line, and His Spirit has been putting it in front of people at kitchen tables ever since.

The second is bread. Look at the size of the thing he names. Not increase. Not comfort. Not a bigger house at the end of the story. Bread. The thing you actually need in order to be alive on Thursday.

That is what God has attached His name to, and it is deliberately unglamorous, and it is the exact size of the thing you are actually afraid of at twenty past one in the morning.

You have not been forgotten. You have been counted, by name, by a God who knows precisely how many squares are on that calendar and has known since before it was printed. That is not a nice thought to get you back to sleep. It is written down, and His Spirit is at that table with you at twenty past one, over the blue biro mark that went through into September.