The Song He Cannot Dance To

They set the chairs in a horseshoe around the floor of the parish hall, because that is how it has always been done here, and the folding table by the door carries the cake, a leaning stack of paper plates, and a fan somebody brought from home. The coffee urn is plugged in at the far wall. The girl is fifteen today. Her dress is the color of the inside of a shell, and for four months she has been practicing the vals in her mother's living room with two cousins and a broom, counting one two three, one two three out loud, laughing, standing on everybody's feet.

Her grandfather is parked by the urn, in the chair with the wheels on it, set where the cord will not trip anyone. He is the one who taught her that count. She was four, and he stood her on the tops of his shoes and walked her around the kitchen table while her grandmother sang the melody wrong on purpose, and he told her, when you are fifteen I take you around the floor first, before your father, before anybody. He said it for years. He bought the shoes for it before she was ten.

Then a Tuesday in March, and ninety seconds, and the left side of him did not come back with the rest of him. Eight years of that now. Eight years of a room with a mirror in it and a patient woman counting for him, one two three, the same count, and it goes into his mouth and it will not go into his leg. He can hum the vals note for note. His foot has not agreed with him since that March.

The music starts. Everybody stands. Her uncle steps out and takes her hand because somebody has to, and he is good at it, and the hall makes the sound a hall makes when a family is proud. The grandfather claps. He is not bitter about the uncle. He claps with the hand that works, against his own knee, on the one, and he is glad, he is genuinely glad, and while he is glad he is counting. March to March. Eight.

You know that arithmetic. Yours may not be a stroke. It may be a court date that ate a decade, or an illness that took the middle of your thirties, or somebody whose choices spent years that were never theirs to spend, or the plain math of another person's need swallowing yours a day at a time. But you know your dates the way you know your own phone number, and you know the exact feeling of clapping from the edge for a song you practiced for. You are counted, every one of those years, and the count is not lost. It is written in Psalm 56:8 that He keeps a record of your wanderings and puts your tears in His bottle, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been keeping the tally beside you the whole time, in the room with the mirror, on every March.

He names the eating four times

Let me read you the promise the way it is actually written, and not the way it gets said over a plate of food at a funeral lunch.

So I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the crawling locust, the consuming locust, and the chewing locust, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

Look at what He does before He promises anything. He counts, and then He counts again. Not the locust. Four locusts. Four names for the stages of one swarm, the swarming and the crawling and the consuming and the chewing, and He puts every one of them in the sentence. God does not say something ate your years. He names the eating four separate times rather than rounding it into a word. Whatever ate yours, the sharp year and the slow year and the year of sitting still and the year that took the most, He has a name for each of them and He does not round the total down.

And be clear about what that verse is not saying to you, because loose quoting is where the damage gets in. Joel was speaking to a nation about a swarm sent in judgment, and nothing on this page says God sent the stroke. What is being read to you is what God does with eaten years, and He is not vague about them. You have a God who counted every one of those eight Marches before you ever thought to. That is not my kindness talking; it is written in Joel 2:25 where the eating gets four names, and it is His Spirit who was in the room with the mirror the whole time, keeping the count you thought only you were keeping.

Restore is not a word about rewinding

Here is the anchor, and it is the honest heart of this.

Who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle's.Psalm 103:5

Read what He satisfies. Not the calendar. The mouth. The man. The psalm does not say the years come back and it does not say the March un-happens; it says the man is filled and the strength is renewed. Restored and replaced are two different words, and the parish hall knows the difference even if the greeting cards do not. Replaced would hand him the eight years back and leave him exactly the man who lost them. Restored puts back into the man what the eight years emptied out of him, and leaves the dates where they fell.

You are being renewed in the part of you the years actually emptied. I say that from Psalm 103:5 and not from sentiment, because what is promised there is a satisfied mouth and a strength like an eagle's, not a returned decade, and it is the same Spirit who renews the inward man day by day while the outward man wears out.

And your anger about the eight years is not corrected here. Nobody is going to tidy it for you. The psalms are full of men asking how long out loud with the count still in the sentence, and God kept those prayers in the book on purpose. You have permission, written down and never withdrawn, to bring the years to Him with the anger still on them, and the Spirit who moved a man to write how long, O Lord, is not embarrassed by the way you would say it.