Six Weeks With the Tab Open

The tab has been open since the ninth of the month before last. She knows the date because she can see when the draft was created and she has looked at it more times than she is prepared to say out loud.

The form is complete. That is the maddening part. Every field is filled in. She wrote the long answer three times and the third version is good, better than anything she would have got out of herself under pressure, and it has been sitting there finished for five and a half weeks.

Every evening she opens the laptop, and it is there, and she reads the first line, and she closes it. Sometimes she moves the cursor to the button and does not click. Once she got as far as a confirmation dialogue and canceled it and then sat with her heart going for ten minutes.

It is not the form. She knows that. It is that saying yes to this means saying something about the shape of the next three years, and nothing in her life at the moment feels fixed enough to make a three-year statement from. Her housing is annual. Her work situation is being reorganized. Two friendships are in a strange place.

Anybody who has an unsent thing knows this. I am not going to tell anybody whether to send it. I do not know what it is, and if I did I would still not know, and anybody who confidently tells a stranger to press the button is enjoying themselves rather than helping. What I want to talk about is where a person can decide from when nothing around them is fixed.

Instructed and guided, with an eye on you

Let me put a line down and count the verbs God takes responsibility for in it.

I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.Psalm 32:8

Four things, and the subject of all four is God. Instruct, teach, show the way, guide. There is not one instruction to the person in that verse. It is a list of what somebody else undertakes to do.

And then the last phrase, which is easy to skim: I will guide thee with mine eye. Guiding with an eye is what you do when you are in the same room. It is close-quarters guidance, the kind that happens across a table rather than from a distance, and it assumes proximity rather than requiring the person to go and find out what to do.

You are being guided by Someone who has undertaken all four of those verbs Himself. That is not a nice thought handed to a woman with a tab open. It is what is written in Psalm 32, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line and sets it beside somebody at a shared table. The form is a form. The guiding is God's.

And read the psalm around it and see who is being spoken to. Psalm 32 is a psalm about being forgiven, written by a person coming out of a long stretch of not saying something. The guidance verse is addressed to somebody who has just been let off, not to somebody who has earned direction.

You have instruction available to you as a gift, and it was never something withheld pending better circumstances. Psalm 32:8 is the text this sits on, and it is the Spirit who makes an old psalm land in a room full of laptops.

Six weeks is not a character flaw

Now the part this category exists for.

Not sending it for six weeks is not procrastination and it is not cowardice and it is certainly not faithlessness. I want that dealt with early, because there is a voice in most people that has already filed this under personal failing, and that filing is wrong and it makes everything harder.

Here is what is actually happening, described accurately. She is being asked to make a statement about three years from a position that is annual. That is not a psychological problem. It is a genuine mismatch, and a person who notices it is not being weak, they are being accurate.

And I am not going to advise the decision. Not a lean, not a hint, not a story where the person who sends it is obviously happier. I do not know what is in that form.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:7

A sound mind. Some translations have it as self-control or as clear judgment, and the sense underneath is a mind that is working properly rather than a mind that has been overridden. It is a promise about the faculty, not about the answer.

You were given a sound mind rather than a decided one, and the faculty is the gift. 2 Timothy 1:7 is where the word puts it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person use their own judgment without believing that using it is unspiritual.

You are settled right now, at this table, with the form still unsent and the button still unpressed. It is written that He instructs and teaches and guides with His eye, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that true in a woman whose housing is annual and whose work is being reorganized.

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 plainly about the evenings and the ten minutes with your heart going. A decision that has taken over a person's nights deserves a real person in the room, and being guided by God has never been a reason to go without one.