Retired Early and Not by Choice

The chair by the window and the light on the shelf and a mug on the arm, and it is half past two on a Wednesday, which for thirty one years was the middle of period five.

Six years early.

It was not sudden and it was not dramatic and there is no moment she can point to. There was a term where she was managing, and then a term where she was managing with help, and then a conversation in an office with a woman from occupational health who was extremely kind and who used the phrase realistic expectations, and then it was over and there was a card signed by ninety people.

She grieved it properly. That is the thing she would want said. She did not do the brave face. There were about eight months where she was, by her own description, no use to anybody, and her husband was very good about it and her sister was not, which she has forgiven and remembers.

That was six years ago.

And here is where she has got stuck.

She reads now. Not the way she read before, which was three books a week and mostly forgettable. Slowly. She has read four books this year and she could tell you about all four of them. She has an hour in the morning that is not for anything.

She knows her grandson, actually knows him, in a way that she did not know her own children at that age because she was marking.

And she cannot honestly say she would give it back.

If you have grieved something properly and then found you cannot say you want it returned, you know that chair. And you know how frightening that is, because it feels like a betrayal of your own grief, and there is nobody you could say it to who would not immediately make it into something.

The word, and then whose sentence that verse is

Let me pull up the other chair and be plain, because you are a woman who taught for thirty one years and you will not be helped by anything soft.

The problem is not the retirement. You grieved it and you did it honestly and there is nothing left in you that is denying what it was.

The problem is that you have arrived at a sentence you cannot say, and the reason you cannot say it is that everybody who hears it will hear it as a lesson, and you will not have those six years turned into a lesson, and so you have been sitting on a true thing for about two years.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean the good that came out of it. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking. It was on you in period five for thirty one years and it was on you in the eight months when you were no use to anybody, and it did not arrive with the slow reading.

Now the verse, and I want to be very careful with it, because it is the most misused verse on this subject.

It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn thy statutes.Psalm 119:71

Read the first two words. It is good FOR ME.

That is a first person testimony. It is a man, at some distance, saying a thing about his own life. It is not a general rule, it is not a doctrine of affliction, and it is not something anybody is allowed to say to somebody else about their trouble.

Job's friends said things like that to Job and God's verdict on them at the end of that book is one of the harshest things He says to anybody.

So the verse is available to you and it is available only in your own mouth. You may say it about your own six years. Nobody may say it to you, and that is why every time somebody has, something in you has gone flat.

You have a sentence that is yours to say and nobody else's to say about you, and that is the exact grammar the psalm uses. Psalm 119:71 is written in the first person as testimony rather than instruction, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Spirit of truth, which is why the thing that has been sitting in you for two years has not gone away.

What the psalm claims and what it does not

Now what that verse actually claims, because it claims less than people think and more than you have allowed yourself.

It says: it is good for me that I have been afflicted. It says the affliction has been the occasion of something.

It does not say the affliction was good. It does not say God sent it. It does not say the psalmist would choose it again, and read the whole psalm and you will find he complains bitterly in about nine other places in it, at length, in the same document.

Psalm 119 is a hundred and seventy six verses long and the man who wrote verse seventy one also wrote: my soul cleaveth unto the dust. And: I am afflicted very much. And: the proud have had me greatly in derision.

He is not a man who has resolved it. He is a man who has one thing he can say truthfully about one aspect of it, in the middle of a very long document where he says a great many other things.

You are permitted one true sentence about your six years without it having to be your whole position. Psalm 119 holds that verse and nine bitter ones in the same poem, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to say a partial truth without it becoming a total account.

And I want to say the hard half straight, because this is the category where sites like this one do damage.

Your health did not happen in order to slow you down. God did not take a classroom off a woman to improve her attention. There is no version of this where the six years were administered, and if there were, then every teacher who kept her health would be one He had less to say to, which is obviously nonsense.

You are not looking at a method, and the psalm never once says the affliction was sent. The written word puts the sentence in the first person about a result rather than about a cause, and it is the Holy Spirit who works within what happens rather than arranging it.

How to say the thing you have been sitting on

So here is how it is said, and it takes two sentences and never one.

One: they took the classroom six years early and it was a robbery and I grieved it and I was right to.

Two: I know my grandson, and I read four books this year and could tell you about all four, and God brought that.

And the reason it has to be two sentences is that a single sentence with a but in it always ends up subordinating the first half to the second, and the first half is not subordinate. It is a whole loss and it stands.

You have two sentences available and neither one has to be softened for the other to be true. Psalm 119 keeps the testimony and the bitter verses in one poem without reconciling them, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a person the courage to say a partial good thing without pretending it settles the account.

And your sister, since you mentioned that you remember. You have forgiven her, which you said and which I believe. Remembering is not unforgiveness. It is just memory, and it does not need dealing with.

I do not know what the next years hold. I am not going to guess, and you would not want me to.