Still Saying I Am Just Starting

You said it again last week. Oh, I am just getting started with it really.

Eleven years. You have been just getting started for eleven years, and you said it to a woman who has been doing her own thing for two and had no idea she was talking to somebody with nine years on her.

And nobody is going to correct you, because nobody else is keeping count. That is the thing about this particular sentence. There is no one in the world whose job it is to say, actually, no. You are the only keeper of that number and you have decided not to look at it.

So let us look at it. Not to make you feel better. Just to have it said.

I am not going to tell you to own your experience. That is a phrase from a different kind of website. I am going to talk about counting, because Scripture asks for a count and it asks for it in a very particular spirit.

A prayer that asks for arithmetic

There is a line at the end of a very heavy psalm, and it is a request for something oddly practical.

The psalm is about how short a life is. Seventy years, eighty if there is strength. And then, out of all the things a person could ask for after thinking about that, this is the request.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom. (Psalm 90:12, King James Version)

You are being asked to count honestly, and counting has never once been the same as boasting. Psalm 90:12 makes the numbering of days a thing to be taught by God rather than a thing a person does to feel impressive, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a back room with a calendar on the wall.

Notice that it is a prayer for help. Teach us to number. Apparently a person cannot do it accurately on her own, and apparently it matters enough that God is asked to do the teaching.

And notice what it is for. Not for pride and not for a record. So that wisdom has something true to work with.

You have eleven real years behind you, and naming them has never once been a display. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a prayer about the shortness of a life and makes it reach a woman holding stock over a table, and Psalm 90:12 asks God himself for the ability to count what has actually happened.

What the beginner sentence protects

Let me say what I think just getting started is for, and it is not modesty.

A beginner is allowed to be bad at things. A beginner is allowed not to know. A beginner has no track record to be measured against, and no expectations sitting on her. It is the most comfortable position in the room and you have been standing in it since the children were small.

You were standing in a shelter, and you have never once needed one. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a woman what her own sentence has been sheltering, and the written word asks God to teach the honest numbering of days in Psalm 90:12.

And there is a second cost, and it lands on other people. A woman two years in listens to you say you are just getting started and concludes she is further behind than she is. You did not mean to do that. But the number you hid took something from her too.

Eleven years of knowing things is not nothing. It is the only thing in this room that cannot be bought.

You have something nobody can shortcut, and it has never once needed to be announced to be real. His Spirit is the one who settles a woman about her own history without turning her into a person who talks about herself, and Psalm 90:12 treats an accurate count as the beginning of wisdom rather than as a kind of bragging.

Count it out loud

So here is the exercise, and it is arithmetic.

Count the years. Out loud, on your fingers if you like. Start at the year you first took money for it and count forwards to now. Say the number.

You are able to say a true number, and a number has never once been a claim about quality. Psalm 90:12 asks for the teaching of honest counting with no suggestion that honesty is self promotion, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a plain figure sayable for a woman who has avoided it for a decade.

The number will surprise you. It always does. You will want to subtract the slow years, and the year you hardly did anything, and the one when your mother was ill. Do not subtract them. You were still the person who did this, in all of them.

And then stop using the word starting. Not forever and not as a rule. Just notice it next time and put something true in its place.

You were never required to stay a beginner to be safe, and you are not required to now. The Spirit of God carries a true count past the part of a woman that wants the shelter, and Psalm 90:12 has the numbering of days asked for as a gift rather than risked as a vanity.