I Resent My Own Life For It

Your friend is getting married in the spring, in another state, and you said no.

You said it well. You have had a lot of practice. You said it with enough warmth and enough regret and just enough detail that nobody asked a second question, and she said of course, and she meant it, and it was fine.

And then you put the phone down and went and stood in the kitchen for a bit.

Because that is the fourth thing this year. There was the weekend in March. There was the concert. There was your sister's thing in August which you got out of by being vague about work.

And every one of them was the right decision. You can defend all four, individually, on paper, to anybody.

What you cannot defend, and have not said out loud to one living person, is what has started happening in you afterward.

You have begun to resent it. Not the saving. The life. The actual days, the ordinary ones, the going to work and coming home and the evenings in a place you have started to think of as temporary.

And then, underneath the resentment, comes the part that really costs: because a woman who resents a life she chose is a woman who is being ungrateful, and you know what you are saving for, and you know how many people would be glad of what you have, and so the resentment gets put away too.

A life is not a waiting area

Let me name the thing that has quietly happened over four years, because you did not decide it and it did not announce itself.

Somewhere in there, this stopped being the life being lived and became the life being got through.

That was not a decision. It was a slow reclassification. Every no moved a little more weight from the present into the future, and after four years the present has almost nothing in it that is there on purpose.

You have been living in a room you stopped furnishing, and a life spent waiting has never once been the same as a life being saved. The Holy Spirit is the one who put a working person's ordinary rest into the book as something good, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 5 that the sleep of a working man is sweet.

And the resentment is not ingratitude. I want to take that word off you now, because it is the thing keeping the whole of this underground.

Resentment is what a person feels when something is being taken from them without acknowledgement. And that is a precise description of what four years of no has done: it has taken real things out of your actual life, one at a time, and nobody has ever once said thank you for it, because nobody knows.

You have given up four years of things nobody ever saw you give up, and a woman who notices that has never once been an ungrateful woman. Ecclesiastes 5 looks squarely at what money does to a person's sleep, and the Spirit of God is the one who thought that was worth writing down.

The sleep of a working woman

Here is the verse, and it is one of the least quoted and most useful lines in the book.

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet, whether he eat little or much: but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep. (Ecclesiastes 5:12, King James Version)

Whether he eat little or much.

Look at what that clause does. It detaches the sweetness of the sleep from the size of the meal. The working person sleeps well on a little and sleeps well on a lot, because what makes the sleep sweet is not the quantity.

And then the second half turns it over: the one with abundance cannot sleep, precisely because of the abundance.

That is not a rule about poverty being better. It is an observation about where rest actually comes from, and it is saying plainly that rest does not come from the amount.

You are able to have a sweet ordinary life on the amount that is currently in your life, and the size of what you have has never once been the thing that decides that. The Holy Spirit is the one who set those two side by side, and the written word says the sleep of a working man is sweet whether he eat little or much.

Now here is the application, and it is not what you expect from a verse like that.

I am not telling you to be content with less. That would be another form of the same instruction that has been running in this house for four years, and it would land as one more thing to be good at.

I am telling you the opposite. The verse describes a person who eats. Little or much, but he eats. There is a meal in that sentence. The sweetness of his sleep is not the sweetness of a man who has stopped having evenings.

You are permitted to eat while you save, and four years of refusing every good thing has never once been what that verse was describing. Ecclesiastes 5 puts a working person's supper and a working person's sleep in the same line, and the Spirit of God is the one who never treated the supper as a leak.