Forty Applications And Two Replies

Forty.

She knows the number exactly, because she keeps them in a spreadsheet, which was a good idea in March and has become something else since. Column A, the company. Column B, the role. Column C, the date sent. Column D was meant to be outcome, and it is almost entirely empty, and the emptiness is the thing she looks at now.

Two replies. One of them from an actual person, four lines long, kind, saying that the field was strong. The other one arrived at 4:02 in the morning and did not have a name on it anywhere, which is a strange way to be told about your own life.

Thirty-eight of them said nothing at all.

That is the part she was not ready for. She was ready for rejection, because rejection is a thing that happens to everyone and you can be brave about it over a cup of tea. Nobody warned her about the silence. Silence has no edges. You cannot be brave at a thing that never arrives. You cannot even be properly angry at it, because there is nobody in the room to be angry at, so the anger comes home and finds the only person available, which is you.

And this is where it goes wrong, slowly, over months. Because a person cannot sit in that much silence without starting to translate it. And the translation is always the same in the end.

They looked at me and did not think I was worth four lines.

You are somewhere in that spreadsheet, or its equivalent. Maybe your version is a folder in your email you no longer open. Maybe your version is a phone that sits face up on the kitchen table all day like something that has failed to go off. You have rewritten the same page eleven ways. You have been told to keep your chin up by people who go to work in the morning. And the hardest hour is not the refusal. It is the Tuesday afternoon at half past two when the house is quiet and there is genuinely nothing more you can do today, and the doing is the only thing that has been holding you together.

She looks at the empty column for a while. Then she does something small, and she cannot tell you why she does it. She opens a notebook, writes the date in March at the top of a clean page, and sits with her hand flat on it.

This is when I started asking.

The empty months are in the same hand

There is a psalm written by a man in hiding, and it is not a serene psalm. He says his strength has failed, that he has become like a broken pot, the sort of thing you would sweep up and throw out. He says he is forgotten like a dead man out of mind. That is a man describing being passed over, and he does not tidy it up before he says it.

And in the middle of that, six words.

My times are in your hand.Psalm 31:15

Times, plural. Not my time, as in one appointed hour still to come. All of them. The good year, the year with nothing in it, the March that started this, the Tuesday afternoon at half past two. The full months and the empty months are being held in the same hand, at the same temperature, by Someone who is not counting the empty ones as wasted.

That is a very different picture from the one you have been living in. You have been living as though the waiting is a corridor, an unpaid stretch of nothing you have to get across before your life resumes on the other side of an offer. Scripture does not have a corridor. It has a hand, and you are in it now, at the same level of held as you will be on the day somebody finally writes back.

Now let me name what the silence has been quietly doing, because naming it takes most of its power away. It has been auditioning for the role of verdict. Thirty-eight unanswered messages start to sound like a judgement handed down about your worth, your age, your years out, the gap on the page you keep having to explain. Hear this plainly: the silence is not a verdict, and the delay is not God's opinion of you. An inbox is not a courtroom, and the people who did not reply mostly did not decide anything about you. They were busy, or there were nine hundred others, or the post was already filled before it was ever posted.

And your worth was never on that spreadsheet in the first place. You were not made valuable by being employed and you are not made worthless by not being. Joseph was the same man in the prison as in the palace, and the years in between were not deducted from him. He was being held the whole time, in the dark, by a hand that had not let go once.

I am not going to tell you when this ends. I do not know, and I would not put a date on God for you. What I can tell you is that He is not silent even when everyone else is, and that He still opens doors in ordinary weeks for ordinary people, in the present tense, today. That is not a story about what He used to do. It is a description of what He is like.