The Years They Remember and I Do Not

It happens at Christmas mostly, and it happened again last year, and it will happen this year and she has already begun to brace for it.

Somebody says, do you remember the year the pipe burst.

And everybody does. Her son does it in an accent, because apparently the plumber had one. Her daughter remembers what they ate for four days and remembers a bucket in the hall and remembers that the two of them slept in the same room and made it into an adventure.

And Marion, who was there, who was in that house for all four days, has nothing. Not a fragment. Not a bucket, not a plumber, not a meal.

She is sixty six. Her children are thirty eight and forty one and both of them are, by any measurement, doing well, and both of them love her, and neither of them has ever once said anything about those years except in the affectionate way people talk about a difficult old house.

She stopped drinking at fifty two. Fourteen years. She has been a good grandmother and she knows it.

And what she carries, and has never said out loud to a living soul, is not guilt about what she did. It is a gap. There are years in the middle of her own life that other people own and she does not, and the ones who own them are the ones she was supposed to be looking after.

You know that gap. It might be years, or a stretch, or a particular period that everybody else can describe and you cannot. And it does not feel like guilt. It feels like theft, except that you were the one who did it, so there is nowhere to send the complaint.

You have a promise made about time itself, and you were never told only your circumstances could be repaired. Joel says I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, and He says years rather than crops or houses; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real promise to a woman of sixty six at a Christmas table.

I will restore to you the years

Let me say the honest thing first, the way I would across my own table, because I am too old for the other kind of comfort.

There is a thing people say here, and it is well meant and it is no use. They say, but you were there, you were in the house, you did more than you think. That may all be true and it does not touch it, because what you are carrying is not a question about your record as a mother. It is that a piece of your own life is held by other people and not by you, and no reassurance about how good a mother you were addresses a missing thing.

So let me take you to the one place in Scripture where God promises the return of time.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

Read what the object of that sentence is. Not the crops. Not the vines, not the fields, not the houses, all of which had also been destroyed and all of which He deals with elsewhere in the chapter.

The years. He promises to restore the years, which is the one thing in the whole passage that nobody can rebuild, replant or repair. You cannot go back and live a year again. Everybody knows that. And God, who also knows it, made the promise about that specifically.

You have a promise made about the one thing nobody can rebuild, and you were never left with only the repairable parts. That is what stands written in Joel 2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that promise land on a woman bracing for a Christmas table.

And notice the honesty in the second half: my great army which I sent among you. God does not soften what happened or pretend the years were fine. The locusts are named, in four kinds, and the damage is not minimized anywhere in that chapter. The promise sits next to an accurate description of the loss, which is the only place a promise is worth anything.

You are being handed a promise that sits beside an honest account, and you were never being asked to pretend the years were not eaten. Scripture names the damage in full before it names the restoration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hold both without choosing between them.

And I want to say something about the word restore to you, because at our age it matters. It does not mean rewind. Nothing in Scripture rewinds. It means to make good, to repay, to render back the value of a thing. What God restores is not the calendar. It is what the years were for: the relationship, the belonging, the fruit that those years were supposed to produce. And you can see some of that at your own table already, in two people in their forties who love you and who are, by any measurement, doing well.

You are already looking at some of the restoring, and you were never going to receive it as a returned calendar. The written word promises a rendering back rather than a rewind, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person recognize restoration when it is sitting at their table in its thirties and forties.

And the plain thing, said as I would say it to my own sister. Fourteen years of never once saying this out loud is a long time to hold something on your own, and there is no age at which it becomes too late to tell somebody. A counselor. A friend. The group in the church hall on a Thursday. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and it is not a criticism of anybody in your family.