The Part She Misses and Cannot Say

Everybody agreed. That is the thing about Steph's situation. Every single person who knew anything about it agreed.

She left the practice in January. Fourteen years as an office manager for four dentists in a building where the arrangement had, over about a decade, become something nobody would have designed on purpose: her doing three jobs, her name on none of them, a senior partner who spoke to her in a way that other people winced at and nobody addressed. Her husband had been saying it for six years. Her sister had been saying it for four. When she finally handed in the notice, her sister actually cried.

She has a new job. It is better. Fewer hours, more money, an office where somebody says good morning like they mean it.

Here is what she has not said to anybody.

She misses it. Not the partner. Not the arrangement. She misses the two-fifteen slump when Denise from reception would come back and they would split whatever was in the drawer. She misses knowing where everything was. She misses being the person who could fix any problem in that building in under four minutes, and the way that felt, and the fact that everybody knew it. She misses the sound of that particular door.

At the new place she is competent and nobody knows yet that she is exceptional, and it will take about two years for them to find out, and she is forty-eight.

Here is the moment it caught.

She drove past the old building in March, not on purpose, road works, and she saw Denise on the step with a coffee and she put her hand up and Denise waved and grinned and mimed calling her, and Steph drove on and got about four blocks and had to pull over.

And her husband asked that night how her day was, and she said fine, and he said, "You seem off," and she said, "I'm just tired."

You have something you miss. Not the bad part. The bad part you would not touch. Something else, something ordinary, that was inside the thing you were right to leave, and you have never said it out loud because of how it would sound to the people who were glad when you went.

The text does not argue with them

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to go back. I am not going to tell you never to think about it. I am not going to give you a verdict on the place you left or on anybody in it, and I am not going to tell you how long this lasts.

And most of all I am not going to shame you for the missing. I want to say that in a whole sentence, because a lot of preaching about looking back exists mainly to make people feel worse about a thing they already feel bad about.

What I will do is take you to Numbers 11, which is the passage everybody uses to scold people, and read it more carefully than it usually gets read.

Israel is in the wilderness. They have the manna. And they say this:

We remember the fish, which we did eat in Egypt freely; the cucumbers, and the melons, and the leeks, and the onions, and the garlick.Numbers 11:5

Now, that passage is usually preached as a failure of thankfulness, and there is genuinely a complaint going on in that chapter and I am not pretending otherwise. But look at what the text does not do.

It does not say they were making it up.

There were fish. There were cucumbers and melons and leeks. Egypt, whatever else it was, had a river and gardens and food that grew, and the people who had been there really had eaten those things, and Scripture puts the list in without once disputing a single item on it.

You are remembering something that was actually there, and Scripture does not require anybody to pretend a hard place had nothing good in it. Numbers 11:5 records the list without correcting it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a car pulled over four blocks from an old office.

That matters more than it looks. Because the way this usually gets handled in a person's own head is by argument: it was not that good, remember what he was like, remember the Tuesday he said that. And all of that is true, and none of it touches the missing, because the missing was never about the bad part.

You have never been asked to falsify your own memory in order to be allowed to have left, and the text keeps both the bondage and the melons in the same book. It is written that they ate those things freely, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an honest memory safe to hold.

What the missing is actually made of

Now let me be careful here, because this is where it goes wrong.

There is a difference between longing and intending, and almost nobody separates them, and the failure to separate them is what keeps people silent.

Steph does not intend to go back. If the senior partner called tomorrow and offered her double she would not consider it for four seconds. Her longing has no plan in it at all. It is not a strategy, it is a feeling, and a feeling is not a decision waiting to happen.

You are not one weak moment away from undoing what you did, and a longing without a plan in it has no power to move anybody anywhere. Philippians 3:13 has Paul pressing forward while plainly remembering what is behind, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a memory from being read as an intention.

And there is a second thing worth naming, because it is the part that actually aches. What Steph misses is not really the drawer or the door. It is being known. Fourteen years of being the person who could fix anything in four minutes is fourteen years of being known, and she has traded that, correctly, for a place where nobody knows her yet.

That is a real loss and it does not go away because the trade was right.

You are grieving being known rather than wanting to be back inside it, and those two are not the same thing at all. Numbers 11:5 has them naming specific foods rather than the arrangement they were under, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference when a person cannot.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the missing has gone somewhere heavier than sad, or if pulling over four blocks away has become a regular thing rather than a one-off, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your husband, your sister, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about the old job. That is me refusing to leave you in that car by yourself.