He Restores the Eaten Years

Before the sum, the true thing: it is still lit in you.

I know that because of what wakes you. Nobody does that arithmetic about a life they have stopped caring about. A man who was genuinely finished with God would sleep straight through.

He is fifty-six and it starts at about two, most nights, and it goes in the same order every time.

Nine years. He has settled on nine, which is generous to himself at one end and hard at the other, and he could argue either boundary.

Then what was in them. The business, which took everything and did not work. The stretch where he was not much of a father and both his children are polite about it now in a way that is worse than if they were not. The friendships he did not keep because he had nothing left over. And underneath all of it, a thing he does not put into words often: he was thirty-four and he had something, and there were people around him who were being helped by it, and then there was a decade in which none of that happened.

Then the multiplication, which is the part that keeps him up. Not what he lost. What it cost. The people who were not helped. The version of the man he would have been by now if the nine years had gone the other way.

He does not weep about it. He lies there and works it out again, with a kind of grim competence, and has done for years.

God speaks about eaten years directly

There is one place where God takes up the exact category you have been totaling, and He does not minimize it.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.Joel 2:25

Notice first that He agrees with you about the eating. He does not say the years were secretly fine, and He does not say you have been exaggerating. He names the loss as real. Years were eaten. That is His own word for it.

Anybody who has told you the nine years were secretly productive was being kind at the expense of being true, and God is not doing that here. He is more honest about your loss than your comforters have been.

And then, having granted the loss, He puts the restoring in His own hands. I will restore. The verb is His. Nowhere in that sentence is a man told to make it up, to work harder in the years remaining, to compress what was lost into what is left.

You are dealing with a God who has named the eating as real and put the restoring in His own column. That is not me softening the sum; Joel 2:25 grants the loss and then takes the repair, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old promise to a locust-stripped country and lays it beside a man lying awake at two.

The multiplication is not yours to run

Now let me go at the part that actually keeps you up, because it is not the nine years. It is the multiplication.

You are not adding up what happened. You are computing what did not, and that is a different operation and an unbounded one, because there is no limit to a hypothetical. You can always find one more person who was not helped, one more year of compound effect, one more version of yourself who was better than the man in the bed.

That sum has no total. It is not that you have not finished it; it cannot be finished. And you have been trying to finish it nightly for years.

You have been running a calculation that has no answer, and God has never once run it about you. The written word puts the restoring in His hands rather than the reckoning in yours, and the Holy Spirit is not the accountant of a man's unlived decades.

And I want to say the plain thing about the nine years, since you have been unfair to them. A business that failed took everything you had, which means you were giving everything you had. A father who was not much of one for a stretch and knows it and grieves it is a father who loves his children, and the ones who do not love them do not lie awake about it.

None of that is a defense of the decade. It is a correction of who you think was in it.

You are not the man that sum describes, and there has never been an account with those figures in it. Scripture puts no condemnation on a person who is in Christ, without a clause about lost decades, and the Holy Spirit has been the one keeping the ember through every year of the nine.