The Thirty Year Wait

He congratulated him properly. That needs to be first, because it is the true part and everything after it is complicated.

He went across the room, and put out his hand, and then put his other hand on top of it the way he does, and said something specific and warm and not general, and the younger man was visibly moved by it, and it was not performance. He meant every word at the moment he said it, and he would say the same words again tomorrow, and he did in fact say them again on the phone two days later.

Then he went home and could not sleep, and did not sleep properly for about eleven days.

Thirty years. That is roughly how long he has been available for the thing that was given last week to somebody who arrived fourteen months ago and who is, by any measure anybody could name, a good choice.

And here is the strange part, and it is the part that has kept him awake. He has tried, in those eleven nights, to say what exactly he was waiting for. And he cannot.

It is not the title. He genuinely does not want to be introduced that way and never has. It is not the work, because most of the work he has been doing already, unofficially, for years, and will keep doing. It is not the money, which is negligible.

So he has been waiting thirty years for something he cannot identify, and he only discovered it was missing when somebody else got it.

That is the shape of it. There was no ache before last week. There was a perfectly good thirty years, spent well, mostly content. And a single announcement did not take anything from him and yet somehow revealed a hole that he would have sworn was not there on the Saturday.

You will have your own eleven nights. The thing you did not know you were waiting for until it went to somebody else.

What the psalm asks for first

There is a psalm about exactly this situation, and the instruction in the middle of it is more specific than the way people usually quote it.

Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for him; fret not yourself over the one who prospers in his way, over the man who carries out evil devices!Psalm 37:7

I want to set the last clause aside, because it does not apply here. The younger man is not carrying out evil devices; he is a good choice and everybody knows it. Which actually makes the psalm more useful rather than less, because look at what remains once you remove the villain: fret not yourself.

That is a strikingly modest instruction. Not: rejoice. Not: get your heart right. Not: examine yourself and find the sin. Fret is a word about a repeated small motion, the way cloth frets against a buckle and wears through. The psalm is describing a man going over something at night, and it does not command him to feel differently. It asks him to stop rubbing.

So take it plainly: you are being asked to stop rubbing rather than to feel something you do not feel, and that is what Psalm 37 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an instruction about not wearing yourself through and lays it down on eleven nights of not sleeping.

And the first half is where the answer to his real question sits. Be still before the Lord. Not be still in general. Before the Lord, which is a location. He has been trying to work out what he was waiting for by examining the thing itself, in the dark, alone, and the psalm suggests he was never going to identify it that way, because the missing thing is not identifiable from inside the fretting.

Which is worth saying plainly, because it is the actual mercy here. He does not have to name it. Thirty years of waiting for something he cannot describe does not have to be solved before it can be handed over. You have permission to hand over a thing you cannot name, and Scripture is what grants that rather than my kindness, and His Spirit is the one who receives what a person cannot put into words.

The younger man has taken nothing

Now the guardrail, and it is important because the temptation here is exquisitely subtle.

The younger man is a good choice. Fourteen months is not a disqualification, seniority is not a line, and the whole idea that thirty years of availability constitutes a claim is precisely the arithmetic this site exists to dismantle. There is no line. There was never a line. Nobody was skipped, because nobody was in a line.

And the older man is not the more faithful of the two. That sentence is not available here. Thirty years does not outrank fourteen months, and waiting is not a form of accrual, and being passed over is not a spiritual credential.

If this article leaves anybody sitting with a quiet sense of being the one who really deserved it, then something has gone badly wrong, because deserving has just walked back in wearing patience as a coat.

And notice how much that removes rather than how much it costs. A man who has no claim has nothing to have been cheated of, and a man who has nothing to have been cheated of can go to sleep. The thirty years lose nothing in the arrangement; they were never a deposit, so they cannot have been spent. You have thirty years that were never a claim and were never wasted either, and Scripture is what holds both of those at once rather than my saying so, and His Spirit is the one who keeps the second half from being drowned out by the first.

So: you have nothing to win in that room and nothing that was owed to you, because a crown in Scripture is placed on a head and never earned, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You are held by a regard that did not move when a name was announced, and the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our years, and His Spirit is what keeps that from thinning out on night twelve.