Nothing She Can Point At Yet

She made the list on a Tuesday, in her head, in a bus, and it did not take long.

Twenty-four. Third job since finishing, and none of them the thing. A room in a shared apartment with three other people, all of whom are fine and none of whom she chose. No property. No partner. No work that anybody would call a career yet.

It is not that she is unhappy. It is not even that she feels behind, exactly, though she has read enough to have that vocabulary if she wanted it.

It is a specific and slightly frightening thought that arrived on that bus and has not gone: there is nothing yet that would still be here. Not a building, not a body of work, not a child, not an institution, not a plant she has kept alive for four years. If she stopped, on that Tuesday, there would be nothing to point at, and the thought that came after it was worse, which was: and I am not sure there ever will be.

Anybody in their twenties who has had that thought on a bus knows this. And I want to say at the start that this article is not going to hand anybody a legacy project. Nobody is going to be told to make their life count, and nobody is going to be told that a person who leaves nothing visible has wasted anything, because both of those are lies and the second one is a cruel lie.

Not in vain, and nobody could tell

Let me put down a line and notice what it is attached to.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord.1 Corinthians 15:58

That is the last verse of the resurrection chapter, and it lands after fifty-seven verses of the hardest argument Paul ever made. And what he closes with is not a great work. It is labor, ordinary word, the kind that describes what a person does on a Wednesday.

And the promise is not that it will be visible. It is that it is not in vain, which is a statement about whether it evaporates rather than about whether anybody can see it. The Corinthians he wrote that to were mostly slaves and tradespeople and women running households, and almost none of them left anything a historian could point at, and the sentence was addressed to them.

You are doing labor that Scripture says is not in vain, and nobody was ever going to be able to tell that from outside. That is not a nice thought handed to a woman on a bus. It is what is written in 1 Corinthians 15, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a shared kitchen on a bright evening. The list is short. The labor is not in vain.

And notice the two words before it: steadfast and unmoveable, which are both establishment words, and they are used about people who owned nothing.

You have been called steadfast and unmoveable in a letter written to people with no property and no titles. 1 Corinthians 15:58 is where that stands, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an old ending land in a woman of twenty-four with three flatmates.

Nobody is going to hand her a project

Now the part this category exists for, and it is the reason nothing here is a plan.

There is no assignment. She is not going to be told to start something, build something, or find her purpose. Those instructions are handed to people in their twenties constantly, they generate an enormous amount of quiet failure, and they rest on a premise this site does not hold, which is that a life is validated by a visible output.

And the harder half: nobody who leaves nothing visible has wasted a life. Not the woman who raised children nobody wrote about. Not the man who did a job well for forty years in a town nobody has heard of. Not somebody who was kind at a bedside on a Tuesday.

Whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men.Colossians 3:23

Paul writes that to household slaves. The most invisible workers in the ancient world, doing work that would leave no trace at all, and he tells them their work has a different audience.

You were given a different audience for your work, and the visibility of it was never the measure. Colossians 3:23 is where that is written, and it is the Spirit of God who moves that from a page into somebody who has just made a list in her head.

You are building right now, in a life with nothing on the list, and the labor is not in vain because of who it is done to. It is written that the labor in the Lord is not in vain, and it is His Spirit who makes that true in a woman with three jobs behind her and none of them the thing.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the plain truth about the thought on the bus. That particular thought has a way of getting heavier at night in your twenties, and being told your labor is not in vain has never been a reason to sit with it alone.