Fifty-Two and Counting Backwards

The coffee urn is ticking as it cools and somebody has already started stacking the chairs at the back, which is the sound a midweek service makes when it is properly over. In the vestibule there is a plate of cookies down to the plain ones, and four women standing in their coats because they are leaving in a minute, and have been leaving in a minute for twenty-five minutes.

She is the one holding her cup with both hands.

They are lovely to her. That is the thing she wants understood. Nobody in that vestibule has ever made her feel like a newcomer. They ask after her knee. They saved her the good chair. One of them puts a hand on her arm when she talks and leaves it there.

Then somebody new to the group, meaning well, asks the question. So how long have you been walking with the Lord?

And she says three years, and she smiles, and the conversation carries on to the flower schedule and whether the heating is coming on early enough now.

But the sum has already started. It starts before she has finished the sentence, every single time. Fifty-two. She was fifty-two on the Tuesday it happened, in her own kitchen, with the radio on. Eighteen when she left home. So that is thirty-four. Thirty-four years, and if she wanted to be precise about it she could go month by month, and some nights she does.

She does the counting in the car on the way home. She has a stretch of road, between the stop sign and the turning by the mailbox, that she thinks of privately as where the counting happens. By the time she pulls up outside the house she has usually got to the part where she stops counting and just sits with the engine off.

Nobody has any idea. She has led the Wednesday prayer twice. She sends the texts nobody else remembers to send, on the day, every time. In the vestibule she is one of the women in coats, holding a cup, laughing at something, and inside her head there is a running total that never once resets and never once gets smaller.

You know this. Maybe your number is different. Maybe it is nine years or twenty-nine, maybe it is one decade and not three, maybe you would not put it in a sentence for anybody. But you know what it is to be genuinely, gladly here, and to be doing arithmetic underneath the gladness the whole time. You know what it is to hear a warm question and to answer it out loud while a second, older, colder answer runs behind your teeth.

The book that names the locusts and gives the years back anyway

Joel is writing to people who have watched a land get eaten. Not metaphorically. Wave after wave of locusts came through and took the vines and the fig trees and the grain, and there is nothing left standing but the naked branches, and in the middle of that God says this.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

Read it slowly, because there are two things in there that most people only ever hear one of.

He gives the years back. And He does not soften a single line of the record. My great army which I sent among you. He names them. He counts them. He does not say it was not as bad as they remember, He does not say the vines were not really gone, He does not tell them to look on the bright side of a stripped field. He tells the truth about what happened, in detail, and then He says the word restore in the same breath.

You are being handed your years back by a God who is not pretending about them. Scripture says He restores the years the locust has eaten and names the locusts in the same sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a nice feeling in a vestibule, who makes both halves of that land in the same heart at the same time.

That is the whole architecture of this house and I want you to have it plainly. The record stands. The verdict is changed. Anybody who offers you the second without the first is asking you to lie about your own life, and lying about your own life is a poor foundation for peace. You do not have to say those years were fine. They were not fine. You are not required to reclassify them in order to be free of them.

You have a God who tells the truth about your history and refuses to leave you in it. It is written that He is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, plenteous in mercy, and the same Spirit who searches the deep things of God is the one holding that verse open over a stretch of road between a stop sign and a mailbox.

He never asked you to explain them

Here is what I am not going to do, because it is done to women like you constantly and it is cruel dressed up as encouragement.

I am not going to tell you those thirty-four years were secretly a training course. I am not going to hand them back to you relabeled as preparation, as though God arranged the whole thing to make you useful later. Some of those years were simply spent. He is not going to pretend otherwise, and I am not going to assign them a purpose in order to make you feel better about them, because a made-up purpose is a lie and a lie will not hold your weight at three in the morning.

And I am not going to ask you what happened in them. Not one word. The number is yours, the detail is yours, and God has never once required an itemized account as the condition of taking them.

You are not being asked to explain a single year of it. His word says that if we confess our sins He is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your explanation, who does the cleansing part.

I want to say one more thing before we go on, because some of you have gone very still. Not every one of those years was a free choice. Some of you were pushed, worn down, kept in a corner, worked on for years by somebody who knew exactly what they were doing. A signature somebody leaned on is not a signature. If that is your history, then hear this: what was taken from you is not what you spent, and God has never for one second filed it under either.

You are standing in front of a God who has already sorted what was yours from what was done to you. It is written that He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can tell the difference between guilt and a wound in you, which nobody at three in the morning has ever managed on their own.