Eighteen Years in the Applause

The names are read in alphabetical order, so there is time. The hall is warm with too many people in good clothes, the program is being used as a fan three seats down, and every family stands when their name comes and sits again, a wave moving up and down the rows. When her niece's name comes their row goes up like everyone else's, her sister crying, her brother-in-law whistling in a way that will be discussed later, and she is on her feet with them, clapping.

She looks at her hands while she claps. That is the thing. Not at the stage. At her own knuckles, the ones the illness swelled and settled and left different, and the sound they make together, and she does the arithmetic she always does in a place like this. Her niece was four when it started. Four, with a gap in her teeth, sitting on the end of a hospital bed swinging her legs. Now there is a gown and a scroll and a young woman turning to find her family in the crowd, and between the swinging legs and the gown are eighteen years, and she was in bed for most of them, or in a chair, or in the long gray middle where you are neither.

She did not choose it. That is what she cannot get past, even here, even happy. Something else ate those years and she did not get a vote. Nobody sat her down and asked. She was twenty-nine and then she was forty-seven and the whole of a life that other people lived went past outside a window she could not always sit up to look through.

The applause goes on. She keeps clapping. She is glad, she is genuinely glad, and she is counting.

You have your own hall and your own arithmetic. Yours may be an illness, or a marriage that ate a decade on somebody else's decisions, or an institution that swallowed a childhood, or a stretch of time that simply went while you were keeping somebody else alive. You know the dates. You could say them faster than your own phone number. And you know the exact feeling of clapping for a life while doing sums on your own, and the sentence under it that you have never said in a hall full of people: those years were eaten and I did not get a vote.

You are not the only one in that hall keeping the count. Joel 2:25 has God naming four separate kinds of locust in a single line, which is written that way because He does not round an eaten year down, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been counting beside you through every year you thought you were counting alone.

He named four kinds of locust

Let me read you the promise exactly, because people have quoted it at you loosely for years, and loose is where the damage gets in.

I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter, my great army, which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

Read what He does before He promises anything. He counts. Not the locust, four locusts, four names for the stages of a swarm, the one that swarms and the one that hops and the one that destroys and the one that cuts. God does not say something ate your years. He names the eating in four words. Whatever ate yours, whether it was the slow year and the sharp year and the year of doing nothing and the year that cut, He has a name for each of them, and He does not round the total down. And be clear about one thing that verse is not saying to you: Joel was speaking to a nation about a swarm sent in judgment, and nothing in this article says God sent your illness. What is being read to you is what God does with eaten years, and He is not vague about them.

Now the pit, and it stays open the whole way through, because a site that closed it would be lying. Some of those years are not coming back. Restored is not replaced. The four year old is twenty-two and there is no version of restoration in which she is four again and you are well and the eighteen years are handed to you in a box. If anybody has told you that is what Joel means, they meant well and they were wrong, and I am not going to repeat it to you in a softer voice. And if the arithmetic in the applause has started to say that what is left is not worth having, that is a sentence to say out loud to a person tonight, not only to a page; the counting is not meant to be done alone.

You are counted, every eaten year of you, and none of it is written off. I say that from the written verse and not from kindness: the God who named four locusts in one line does not lose track of eighteen years, and it is His Spirit who searches everything, including the long gray middle you could not always sit up in, and He was there for all of it, keeping the count you thought only you were keeping.

What restore actually means

Here is the honest heart of it. When Joel says restore, he is not describing a calendar running backwards. He is describing what God does to a person and a people who have been eaten down to the ground: He puts back into them what was taken out of them. Not the years. The person the years were taken from.

Peter says the same thing in the plainest possible sentence, to people who had lost more than time: after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who called you to His eternal glory in Christ, will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish you (1 Peter 5:10). Read who is being restored. Not the situation. You. Himself, personally, not through a change of circumstance. You have a God who is restoring the person and not handing you a copy of the years, and that is the written promise and not my paraphrase of it; and it is the Holy Spirit doing the restoring, at His pace and in the person, whether or not a single thing outside you changes. Restored is not replaced. It is deeper than replaced. Replaced would give you the years back and leave you the same woman who lost them. Restored gives you back yourself.

And your anger, at the illness, at the person, at the institution, at the sheer unfairness of not getting a vote, that anger is not corrected here. Moses prayed, make us glad for as many days as You have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil (Psalm 90:15), and he prayed it out loud, in the Bible, with the count in it. God kept that prayer in His book. You have permission, in writing, to bring the years to Him with the count still in them, and the Spirit who moved Moses to write that line is not embarrassed by yours. Handing the years over is not the same as saying they did not matter. It is saying they matter too much to keep carrying alone.