What She Tells the New Girl

The new one is called Priya and it is her first Tuesday. Dana has been the office manager here for nine years, which means she is the one who does the walking around: where the good pens live, which printer eats envelopes, why the side door sticks in wet weather. And somewhere between the copier and the kitchen, in a voice pitched low and friendly, Dana says the thing she always says.

"Just so you know. Mr. Alden can be a lot before ten. He is not angry at you. He is just direct."

Priya nods, grateful, and files it away, and the morning goes on.

Dana has said that sentence, or something close enough, to eleven people. She said it to herself first. Her own first week, a man she had met four days earlier put a folder down on her desk hard enough to move the coffee, and a woman two desks over leaned across and murmured, don't take it personally, he is just direct. Dana remembers the relief of it. Not a problem. A style. A weather pattern. Something you dress for.

So she dressed for it. For nine years she has scheduled the difficult conversations after eleven. She has learned to leave the invoices on the corner of his desk and walk away rather than hand them over. She has a particular flat voice she uses on the phone when he is in the room, and she did not decide to develop it, and she could not tell you the year it arrived. Twice she has cried in her car in the lot and been fine by the time she got to the light. Once, at a cousin's wedding, somebody asked what her boss was like and she heard herself say, oh, he's fine, he's just direct, and her cousin laughed and said, that's what my sister used to say, and Dana changed the subject so fast it left a mark on the conversation.

Here is the moment, though. It is not the folder and it is not the car.

It is Tuesday, and she is standing in the hallway saying her sentence to Priya, and Priya says, "Oh, that's okay, my last place was like that too."

And something in Dana snags. Because for one second she is not the person handing out the category. She is on the other end of it, at twenty-six, being handed the same one, and she can see the whole nine years lined up behind that little kindness like cars behind a stopped truck. She says something bright and moves the conversation on. But the snag stays. All afternoon, and in the lot, and at the light.

You have a sentence like that. Something you say about your situation, smooth from use, that keeps the person hearing it from having to be alarmed. It is not a lie. That is what makes it work. It is a true thing said in the exact tone that stops it from counting.

The sentence that does the work

Let me say plainly what I am not going to do, because that is the part most people brace for.

I am not going to tell you what your situation is. I cannot see it from here. It might be a job, a house, a family arrangement, a role somebody handed you at twenty-two that nobody has ever taken back. I am not going to hand you a word for it. I am not going to tell you what to do about it, and I am certainly not going to suggest you should have noticed sooner, because nobody notices the water, and that is not a fault in the fish.

What I am going to do is take you to the two verses at the end of Exodus 2, because they are about exactly this and almost nobody slows down for them.

Four hundred years. Long enough that slavery in Egypt was not an event, it was the climate. Nobody alive remembered otherwise. There was no older generation to say, this is not how it is supposed to be. Whatever sentence the Hebrews handed each other in the doorways, it would have been a gentle one, because a gentle one is what you need in order to keep going.

And then the text says this:

And it came to pass in process of time, that the king of Egypt died: and the children of Israel sighed by reason of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant.Exodus 2:23-24

You were never required to file it correctly before it counted with God, and that is the plainest thing in the verse. Exodus 2:23 has them sighing and groaning and nothing else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient groan a present language.

Read what is actually happening there. It does not say they organized. It does not say they repented of four centuries of accommodation. It does not say they finally understood their situation correctly and submitted a properly worded request. It says they sighed. It says they groaned. A groan is what is left when the sentence stops working and there is no better word yet.

And God heard it.

You have been heard in the years you stopped keeping count of, and the hearing did not wait for you to find better language. Exodus 2:24 puts the hearing before a single thing changes in Egypt, and the same Spirit who moved the writer to record it is the one pressing it into you as you read this. Nothing had moved yet. Pharaoh was still Pharaoh. The bricks were still being made. And the verse is already past the hearing and into the remembering.

Then chapter three, and God tells Moses what He calls it.

I have surely seen the affliction of my people which are in Egypt, and have heard their cry by reason of their taskmasters; for I know their sorrows.Exodus 3:7

Affliction. That is His word for it, not theirs. They had a gentler one. He does not use the gentler one. He looks at four hundred years that everybody involved had learned to call ordinary and He says: seen, heard, known, affliction. Three verbs and a noun, and the noun is the whole thing.

You were never handed a situation God agreed to call normal, and He has not been waiting for your permission to name it. That is Exodus 3:7 and it is written down where anyone can check it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence off a page and lays it on a life.

What He does not do with it

Now hold on to what He does not do, because this is where I would lose you if I got sloppy.

He does not tell Moses to go tell the Hebrews to leave. He does not hand them a strategy. He does not set a date and He does not say how long the road out is going to be. He says: I have seen. I have heard. I know. I am come down.

That is the order. The seeing is first. The coming down is second. The going is a long way further into the book, and there are several chapters of things going worse before anything goes better.

So I am not going to stand here and forecast your life. I do not know when anything changes for you, or how, or whether the shape of it will look anything like you imagine. I will not put a date on God and I will not put a plan in your hands and call it faith. What I can tell you, and I can tell you it flatly, is the part the text actually settles.

You are seen exactly where you are standing, and the seeing came first, before you found a single better word for it. The word for that is Exodus 3:7 and it is not sentiment, and His Spirit is the one carrying it across three and a half thousand years into an office hallway on a Tuesday.

And one more thing, said now rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed than stay quiet and be needed. If any part of the thing you sit inside has stopped being difficult and started being unsafe, that is not something to sort out alone from a page at midnight. Tell somebody tonight. A friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. I am not telling you what to do about your situation. I am telling you I am not willing to leave you unaccompanied in it.