Her Best Friend Got the Place

She typed it three times.

The first one was long and had two exclamation marks and a thing about how she had always known, and she read it back and it sounded like a person doing an impression of themselves.

The second one was better and had a joke in it and she deleted that too, because the joke was slightly at her own expense in a way that was asking for something.

The third one said: that is amazing, so pleased for you. And she sent that one, and then put the phone face down on the desk, and it has been face down for about forty minutes.

They both applied. That is the whole thing. They both applied in November, and they sat in the library and did the personal statements at the same table, and she read Amy's and Amy read hers, and they helped each other, properly, and neither of them was pretending about that.

And Amy got it.

Amy is her best friend since they were eleven and there is a photograph of the two of them in matching coats from a school trip that they both still have.

It is quarter past nine at night. Her mom has already asked, from the landing, whether she is all right, and she said yes in the voice you use.

And what she is actually doing is a thing she cannot tell anybody about, which is trying to work out whether she is a bad person, and she has been doing it for forty minutes with a phone face down.

If you have sent a short message and hated yourself for the length of it, you know that desk. And you know the exact question: is this what jealousy is, or is this just honest, and if it is honest then why does it feel like this.

The word, and then the verb

Let me sit on the end of the bed for a bit and say the plain thing, because your mom is not going to get it out of you from the landing.

The problem is not the message. The message was fine. Nobody in the world reads that message and thinks anything.

The problem is the forty minutes. You have been putting yourself on trial since about ten to nine, and you have got both the prosecution and the defense in the same head, and the trial has no end because there is no evidence that could settle it.

So let me give you the word straight, because it will be somewhere in this.

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 there is not a fixed amount of it: what Amy got was not taken out of a pile with your name on the rest of it, and that is true even though it does not feel true tonight.

Now here is the verse people quote, and I want you to look at the verb, because English hides what it is.

Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep.Romans 12:15

Rejoice is a command. And you cannot command a feeling. Nobody can be ordered to feel something, and Paul knew that as well as anybody who has ever lived.

So it is not an instruction about your insides. It is an instruction about what you do with your body and your voice and your evening. It means: go and be glad with them. Turn up. Say the thing. Be in the room.

Which you did. At quarter to nine, in eleven words, and you have spent forty minutes deciding it did not count because your chest did not match it.

You have already done the thing that verse commands, and the verse never once asked about your chest. Romans 12:15 gives an imperative about company rather than about emotion, and it is the Holy Spirit who bears joy as fruit in a person over time rather than issuing it on demand at quarter past nine.

What honest actually looks like at sixteen

Now the question you have actually been asking for forty minutes, which is whether you are a bad person, and I am going to answer it properly rather than kindly.

Here is the difference, and it is not subtle once you see it.

Envy wants the other person not to have it. That is what it is. It is not sadness that you did not get it, it is a movement in you toward her losing it.

Disappointment wants the thing and is sad. That is all disappointment is. It is what happens when a person wanted something and did not get it, and it is not a moral failure, it is proof that you were actually trying.

So test it. If somebody told you now, this second, that there had been a mistake and Amy was being taken off the list, what would happen in your chest?

You know the answer and you knew it before you finished reading the question. It would be horrible. You would be on the phone in about nine seconds.

That is not envy. That is a girl who is sad and who loves her friend and who has been on trial for forty minutes for a crime that did not happen.

You have been trying yourself for something you have not done, and the test takes about four seconds and you have known the answer the whole time. Scripture distinguishes envying, which is a movement against a person, from ordinary grief at a loss, and it is the Holy Spirit who convicts about actual faults rather than running general trials in a person's head at night.

And the disappointment is allowed to be big. You wanted it. You sat in a library in November and wrote the thing properly. It is fine for that to hurt for a while and it does not need to be resolved by bedtime.

You are permitted to be sad about the same thing you are glad about, and the two do not cancel each other out. The written word puts rejoicing with the rejoicing and weeping with the weeping in one verse without suggesting a person only ever does one at a time, and it is His Spirit who is called the Comforter, which is a job that assumes there is something to be comforted about.

What to do tomorrow, which is small

So here is the practical bit and it is deliberately small, because grand gestures made at quarter past nine are how people end up embarrassed.

Tomorrow, at some point, ask her one real question about it. Not congratulations again. A question. When does she find out about the accommodation, or whether her mom cried, or what she is going to do about the thing with the course in September.

A question is the thing that cannot be faked and also does not require you to feel anything first. It is the physical act of being glad with somebody, and it is exactly what the verb in Romans 12 means.

You have something you can do tomorrow that is real without requiring a feeling, and the verb in that verse was always about the doing. Romans 12:15 commands the company rather than the emotion, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings the feeling along afterwards, which has never once been in the order anybody would choose.

And I am not going to tell you that you will get something better. I do not know. I have no idea what happens to you and nobody who says that to you in the next week does either, and it is the single most annoying sentence available and people will say it about four times.

And I am not going to tell you this happened for a reason. Two people applied and one got it.

What I will tell you is that God's face is toward you tonight, at that desk, with the phone face down, and that it was toward you at the same moment it was toward her, and that neither of those took anything from the other.