Twelve Years in the Photographs

The hall is rented by the hour, somebody ran out of tape, and the last two poster boards are leaning against the radiator instead of hanging. Her daughter made them in secret, which was the whole point. Fifty photographs, roughly one for every year, arranged in a spiral, because her daughter is the sort of person who arranges things in spirals. There is a bowl of pretzels beside them that nobody has touched yet.

She goes over during the part of a party where everybody is getting a drink. She has not seen the boards. She bends a little to follow the spiral around, the way you do, and she starts smiling before she has looked properly, because that is what a person does in front of photographs.

And she is in all of them. That is the thing she cannot get past. Every single year has her in it. There she is at a school gate in a green coat with the collar turned up. There she is at the lake with one hand flat against the sun. There she is at a Christmas table carving something, and at a baptism holding somebody's hat, and on a couch with a cat that died a long time ago. Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one, on around the spiral. She is in every frame. She is smiling in most of them. And she does not remember being in a single one.

Twelve years. Thirty-seven to forty-nine. The doctor's word for it was depression, and the word was accurate, and the word does not begin to cover it. She got up. She packed lunches. She drove to the lake. She stood where a person stands when a camera comes out and her face did what a face does. And she was not there. Somebody wearing her went to the lake, and she watched it from somewhere behind her own eyes, and the shutter could not tell the difference, and now there is a spiral of proof taped to a board that she had a life she cannot remember having.

Her daughter comes over with a paper cup and says, look how many there are. Proud of it. And she says yes, look at them all, and she means it, she is genuinely glad, and underneath the gladness something is quietly doing the arithmetic it always does at a table like this one.

You have your own spiral. It might be photographs, or a school calendar, a folder of pay stubs, a shelf of birthday cards in your own handwriting that you have no memory of writing. Somewhere there is evidence that you were present, and you know the truth, which is that you were not, and the two facts sit on top of each other and will not lie flat. Those years were eaten while you stood in the frame. You did not get a vote. You are seen in all twelve of those years by a God who was in the room on the days you were not, and it is written in Psalm 71:20 that He brings a person up again out of the depths, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been keeping the count beside you the entire time, on every single day you cannot account for.

He does not round the count down

Let me read you the promise exactly, because it has been quoted at you loosely 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

Look at what God does before He promises anything. He counts. Not one locust, four, four names for the stages of one swarm: the one that swarms, the one that hops, the one that destroys, the one that cuts. He does not say something ate your years. He names the eating in four separate words, and He does not round the total down to a tidy number for the sake of the sentence. Whatever ate yours, the flat year and the frightening year and the year you cannot picture at all and the year that cut, there is a word for each of them in the mouth of God. And be clear about what the verse is not saying to you. Joel is speaking to a nation about a swarm sent in judgment, and nothing on this page 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.

You have a God who counted every one of those twelve while you were counting nothing at all. That is not a kindness I am adding on top, it is written into the shape of the verse, four names for four kinds of eating, and it is His Spirit who searches everything, including the twelve years you cannot get back inside of from here, and He was present for every hour of them.

Now the pit, and it stays open the whole way through this, because a page that closed it would be lying to you. Some of what those years held is not coming back. The cat is dead. The daughter handing you a paper cup is not four. Restored is not the same word as replaced. Replaced would hand you the twelve years in a box with the memories reinstalled, and nobody honest is going to say that to you. If someone has told you Joel means the calendar runs backwards, they meant it kindly and they were wrong, and I am not going to repeat it to you in a softer voice.

What comes up out of the depths is a person

Here is the honest heart of it, and it is better than the thing you were promised.

You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again; from the depths of the earth you will bring me up again.Psalm 71:20

Read what comes up. Not the years. Not the lake trip, not the Christmas table, not the version of you who would have been at them properly. Me. A person, brought up again out of the depths by the God who saw the depths and did not look away from them. The psalmist does not ask for the troubles to be unmade. He asks to be revived, and he says it as something God does to a self, never to a calendar.

That is what restoration means on this ground. Not a copy of what was taken. The living return of the one it was taken from. Restored is deeper than replaced, and slower, and it costs God more, because replacing a thing is nothing to Him and raising a person is what He sent His Son to do.

You are the one being brought up again, and it is written that way on purpose, the person and never the calendar. The word in Psalm 71:20 is revive, and revive is done to a living being and not to a date, and it is the Holy Spirit who is doing it in you now, at His pace, whether or not one single thing changes about the record of those years.

And your anger about it 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, and he prayed it out loud with the count still in it, and God kept that prayer in the book. You have permission, in writing, to bring the count to God with the anger still attached to it. Psalm 90:15 is where Moses put it, and the same Spirit who moved him to write his count is not embarrassed by yours. Handing years over is not the same as saying they did not matter. It is saying they matter far too much to keep carrying alone.