She Did Not Get Into That School

End of the day and the field is still warm and they are sitting on their bags because the grass is damp and nobody can be bothered to go home yet.

Two of them plus her. Sana and Rob.

She did not want to come here. That is not a secret and she has said it out loud to both of them, and they know, and it is a thing they are now allowed to be funny about, which took about six months.

She had the other place planned since year eight. The uniform, the open evening, the corridor with the photographs of everybody who had gone on to do things. She had a folder. She had actually made a folder.

She did not get in.

And the two weeks after that were, by her own reckoning, the worst two weeks of her life so far, and she is aware that sixteen years is not very much and she also knows what she means.

And now it is the end of a Thursday in June and she is sitting on her bag on a field with two people she would not have met.

Sana she would not have met at all. Rob she might have and probably not.

And it feels strange to admit that, and she has not admitted it to her mom, because her mom has spent eighteen months being carefully positive about this school in a way that makes it impossible to say anything good about it without handing her a victory.

If you ended up somewhere you did not choose and found something there, you know that field. And you know the awkwardness of it: I do not want to say this was meant to be, because it was not, and I also cannot pretend these two are nothing.

The word, and then a man who took thirteen years

Let me sit on the grass and say the plain thing while nobody is going home.

The problem is not the school. The school is fine and the two people on that field are not fine, they are good, and you know exactly how good.

The problem is that the only sentence available for saying so is one that hands your mom a victory and hands your year eight self a defeat, and you do not want to do either, so you have not said it.

So let me put the word straight first.

Blessed does not mean getting the place. It means the favor of God is resting on a person, His face is turned toward them. It is about where He is looking, and it was on you in the two weeks after the letter, which is a thing nobody has said to you, and it is on you on this field.

Now here is the man everybody quotes about this, and I want to show you the part they leave out, which is the timing.

Now therefore be not grieved, nor angry with yourselves, that ye sold me hither: for God did send me before you to preserve life.Genesis 45:5

That is Joseph, and it is the sentence people put on things.

Here is what nobody mentions. He says it thirteen years after they threw him in a pit.

Thirteen years of being sold, enslaved, lied about, imprisoned and forgotten. He is about thirty nine when he says that sentence and he was seventeen when it started, and there is not one line anywhere in that story where he says it early.

There is no chapter where he is in the pit saying God has a plan. In the pit he is screaming. His brothers mention it much later, in chapter forty two: we saw the anguish of his soul, when he besought us, and we would not hear.

You are sixteen and eighteen months in, and the man everybody quotes at you was thirty nine and thirteen years in when he said his sentence. Genesis 45:5 comes at the end of thirteen years rather than at the start, and it is the Holy Spirit who does not hurry a person into a conclusion they have not arrived at.

What he says and what he does not

Now what he actually says, because he is very precise and people are not precise when they quote him.

He says: God did send me before you to preserve life.

And three verses later he says: so now it was not you that sent me hither, but God.

So Joseph does say God sent him. That is real and it is in the text and this site is not going to pretend otherwise.

But look at what he never does. He never says what they did was good. In the very next generation, in chapter fifty, he says it again with the other half attached: ye thought evil against me, but God meant it unto good.

Ye thought evil. He names it as evil, to their faces, in the sentence where he says God meant good. Both halves, in one verse, in the same breath.

He does not say it was not evil. He does not say they were instruments and should not feel bad. He says: what you did was evil and God worked good out of it, and I am not going to hurt you.

You have a sentence available with both halves in it, and Joseph put them both in the same verse rather than choosing. Genesis 50:20 keeps ye thought evil and God meant it unto good in one line, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to say both without softening either.

And that is the sentence for your field. Not: it was meant to be. Not: it worked out. Something like: I did not get in, and that was a real disappointment, and I have Sana and Rob, and God brought that.

Two halves. And nobody gets a victory.

Your mom, and the eighteen months

Now your mom, quickly, because you brought her up first and she is actually the harder half of this.

She has been carefully positive for eighteen months. Which is exhausting for her and infuriating for you, and the reason she is doing it is that she watched two weeks of you in the summer of year eleven and she has been frightened ever since, and being carefully positive is what a frightened parent does instead of saying they were frightened.

You do not owe her a victory. You could tell her about Sana, though, without giving her one, and if you say it in two halves rather than one she cannot turn it into what you are afraid she will turn it into.

You have a way of saying it that does not concede anything, and it is the same shape Joseph used with people who had actually wronged him. Genesis 50:20 has both halves in one sentence and it neither absolves nor accuses, and it is the Holy Spirit who gives a person a form of words that can be said to family without becoming a fight.

And I am not going to tell you what happens after this school, or that you will get somewhere better, or that the folder was pointing at the wrong thing all along. You are sixteen. I have no idea, and neither does anybody else, and you should be extremely suspicious of adults who tell you they do.