Nineteen to Forty-One

The gorse is out along the top path, that hard yellow it does even in bad weather, and the wind is coming off the water in long pushes that make her put a hand up to her hair and then give up on it.

She walks this three times a week. Up past the caravan field, along the fence line, over the stile with the loose top bar, down to the bench nobody sits on because of the wind. Forty minutes if she keeps moving. Fifty if she stops at the bench, which she does, most evenings, and looks at the water going copper.

And the whole way, without deciding to, she does the arithmetic.

She was nineteen when she went. She is forty one now. Twenty two years, and she can give you the total in months if you want it, because she has worked it out more than once, sitting on that bench, the way other people run a hand along a scar. She could tell you the season she left in and the season she came back in. She has never once told anybody what is in the middle, and she is not going to, and this page is not going to ask her.

She has been back for a while now. It went better than she expected. People were kind, and God was more than kind, and she has a life with actual weekdays in it. And still, every time she is asked anything about herself in a room of people, there is a moment where she works out what she can say about the years between nineteen and forty one, and the answer is always nothing, so she says something about work.

She keeps waiting for the conversation. The one where somebody with the right to ask sits her down and says, so. And she has rehearsed it. She has an account ready that she knows is not adequate, and the reason it is not adequate is that there is no version of it that adds up, because those years did not go anywhere, they just went.

Down in the field below the path a farmer whistles for his dog. Two notes, the second one lower, carrying right across the grass. The dog comes at a flat run from three fields away, and she watches it, and does not think anything about it at all, and keeps walking.

You know that arithmetic. Maybe your numbers are different. Maybe it is four years, or thirty, or one that stands for the rest of them. Nobody took them from you and that is the part that makes them so hard to carry, and you have never once been able to give an account of them that sounded like anything but a person making excuses, so you have stopped trying, and you have started keeping the total instead.

Nobody is standing there waiting for the account

I want to put something in front of you that you may never have looked at closely, even if you have read it, because it is one of the strangest and warmest sentences in the prophets.

I will whistle for them and gather them in, for I have redeemed them, and they shall be as many as they were before.Zechariah 10:8

Look at the middle of that. He gives the reason. He is telling a scattered people why they are being gathered, and the reason He gives is not because they have explained themselves, and not because they came back with a good account, and not because enough time has gone by to make it decent. For I have redeemed them. The ground of the gathering is something He did.

And look at the sound He uses. He whistles. That is not a summons to a hearing. Nobody whistles a person in to be questioned. It is the noise you make across a field when the animal you are calling knows your voice and there is nothing in the world between you and it but distance.

You have been whistled for, and the reason attached to the whistle is His act and not your account. I am not softening that verse to be kind to you. Scripture puts the words for I have redeemed them right there as the stated ground, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line about a scattered nation and carries it out along a cliff path to one woman doing sums on a bench.

There is no conversation coming. There is no sitting down, no so, no adequate version required. You have been braced for a hearing that was never scheduled, and the bracing has cost you more of the last few years than you have noticed.

You are already gathered, and you were gathered before you had anything to say for yourself. It is written that He redeemed them first and gathered them second, in that order, and the Spirit is the one who makes that order land in your chest instead of just being a nice observation about a verb.

The record stands and the verdict is changed

Now I have to be honest with you, because a page that told you the twenty two years never happened would be no use to you by Thursday.

They happened. The record stands. God does not go back and quietly delete a stretch of a person's life, and I would not want Him to, because a God who edits the past is a God whose account of your present cannot be trusted either. You are the one who remembers, and you will keep remembering.

What has changed is the verdict. Those are two different objects and holding them apart is the whole discipline of this. A record is what occurred. A verdict is what it now means about who you are and whose you are. He has not touched the first. He has changed the second, out of His own right to change it, and He changed it before you started walking that path three times a week.

You are standing on a changed verdict and not on a tidied history. His word says redeemed, which never once means undone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps the two from collapsing into each other on the evenings your memory tries.

And one more thing, which needs saying plainly here because this category is where it gets missed. Not everybody who lost years lost them freely. Some readers on this page were pushed, worn down over a long time, or handed something to sign by somebody who had already made sure they had no real room to refuse. A pushed signature is not a signature. If that is your twenty two years, you are not the one who spent them, whatever you have been telling yourself, and nothing in this article is asking you to take a bill that was never yours.

I am also not going to hand you a lesson. There is a version of this teaching that tells you the wasted years were secretly training, and it is meant kindly and it is a lie, and it asks you to be grateful for the thing that hurt you. He does not need those years to have been useful in order to redeem them. He needs them to be handed over.

You have a Redeemer who takes years without extracting a meaning from them first. Scripture says He gathers because He has redeemed, and the same Spirit who brought you home is the one who is not standing over you waiting for you to justify the route.