The Folder of Appointment Cards

The folder came from the drugstore on the corner, ninety nine cents, the school kind with the bent metal clip inside, and she bought it six years ago because the first card would not stay flat in her purse.

It is Thursday morning and the folder is open on the kitchen table with the cards fanned out across the placemats like a hand nobody wants to play. She has been sitting there since the coffee was hot. The coffee is cold.

The cards are all different and all the same. Some are the clinic's cream stock with the little tree printed in the corner. Some are the ones the front desk writes out by hand, and she can tell you which woman at the desk wrote which card by the way the threes are looped. There is one with a gold star sticker on it, because the girl at the window kept a roll of them for the kids and gave her one on a morning she came in crying. There are cards with the time crossed out twice. There are cards with grocery lists on the back of them, because for six years the back of an appointment card was the only paper she ever had in her hand.

Tuesday, 7:40. Wednesday, 6:15, which meant leaving the house at 4:50, which meant not really going to bed. A whole November on one card, because somebody kind in scheduling clustered them together to save her the drive.

And now nothing. He rang the bell three weeks ago. The scans came back the way every person they know had been praying they would, and his sister flew in, and there was a sheet cake with too much frosting on it, and people said the word miracle out loud in this kitchen, and she said it too. She means it. She is not pretending about one syllable of it.

She is also forty one years old, holding six years of Thursdays in a ninety nine cent folder, and there is not one person on this earth she can say that to. Because what exactly would she be complaining about. He lived. That is the answer to every sentence she might start, and it is a good answer, and it closes her mouth every time.

So she does what she has done every morning this week. She puts the cards back in date order, first to last, and she squares the edges, and she does not throw the folder away, and she could not tell you why. Except that if she throws it away, then six years of her life happened to nobody.

You have a folder. Maybe it is not cardboard. Maybe it is a drawer, or a shoebox, or a calendar you cannot make yourself delete, or just the dates themselves sitting in you in order, first to last, which you could recite faster than your own phone number. And you know the exact feeling of being glad and being robbed in the same hour, in the same kitchen, in the same body. You are held by the same hand your times are held in, and not one date in that folder has been written off. I am not saying that to be kind to you. It is written in Psalm 31:15 that a man's times are in God's hand and not in the hand of whatever spent them, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been keeping that count beside you the whole six years, in every parking lot, at every 4:50 in the morning, when you were the only one awake and you thought you were the only one counting.

The hand your times were actually in

I want to put one line in front of you, and I want you to know where it was written from, because the where is half of it.

Psalm 31 is a hiding song. The man writing it says his strength is failing, that his years are spent with sighing, that he is forgotten like a dead man out of mind, that there is terror on every side. His calendar is being written by other people. Where he sleeps, when he moves, how long he stays, none of it is his. And in the middle of that, not after it and not instead of it, he says this:

My times are in your hand; rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!Psalm 31:15

Look at how many hands are in that one sentence. He does not say my times are my own. He never claims that, because it would not have been true, and he was not in the business of saying untrue things to God at four in the morning. He names the other hand out loud, the one that has had hold of his years, and he asks for rescue from it. And in the same breath he says whose hand his times finally belong in.

That is the honesty this whole thing is built on. Nobody is asking you to pretend the six years were not spent by an illness and a schedule and a drive you made in the dark. They were. What is being said over you is which hand they were in the entire time they were being spent.

You have a claim on those six years that nothing which spent them is able to cancel. That is not my sentiment, it is the plain sense of a written line: Psalm 31:15 does not say a man's good times are in God's hand, it says his times, and the psalm around it is nothing but hard ones. And it is the same Spirit who moved that man to write it who is standing beside your table this morning while you square the edges of the cards.

Joel puts it the way this whole site is named for. God said He would restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten. I am quoting the promise and I am not going to enlarge it into something it does not say about your particular calendar. It says God restores. It does not tell you the shape.

Restored is not the same word as replaced

Here is where I have to be plain with you, because a softer version of this would be a lie and you have already had enough of those said kindly in your kitchen.

Nobody is handing the six years back. There is no version of this where the folder empties out and you get Tuesday, 7:40 returned to you as a free Tuesday to spend how you like. Restored is not replaced. Replaced would mean a swap: six back for six gone, and the woman who lost them handed the same six years and left otherwise exactly as she was. That is not what God does, and if it were, it would be smaller than what He does.

Restore means He puts back into a person what was taken out of them. Not the calendar. The person the calendar was spent out of. The one who is now forty one and cannot remember what she used to be interested in. What was eaten was not only dates. It was appetite, and steadiness, and the ability to plan past two weeks, and the sound of your own name in your own mouth. That is what He is restoring, and He does it in the person, at His pace, and it does not wait on a single circumstance changing.

And your anger about it is not a spiritual problem. I want to say that flatly. You are allowed to be furious that six years went and you did not get a vote, and you are allowed to be furious in the same hour that you are glad he lived. Two weathers at once is not confusion, it is accuracy. Moses prayed out loud, in the Bible, make us glad for as many days as You have afflicted us, and for as many years as we have seen evil, and God kept that prayer in the book with the count still in it. You have permission in writing to bring the years to Him with the count still in them, and it is written in Psalm 90:15 in exactly those terms, and the Spirit who moved Moses to pray it is not embarrassed by the arithmetic you have been doing since the coffee went cold.