The Former Days Are Not the Better Ones

The summer has a name in her family, the way certain summers do. They call it the caravan summer, and everybody knows what is meant.

She was nineteen. She had finished her exams badly and had no plan and had a boyfriend who was about to become an ex-boyfriend, and she went for six weeks to help at a site on the coast where the showers never got properly hot and the ground was mostly gravel.

And something happened to her there that has organized her whole life since.

She would find it hard to tell you what it was. There were evenings on the steps of one of the vans. There was a woman called Pat who prayed for her with her hand on her back. There was a night walking down to the sea in the dark with three other girls, singing something, and stopping singing, and none of them saying anything the whole way back.

She is thirty-eight now. Two children. A job she is good at. A marriage that is fine and occasionally more than fine. Eleven years in the same church.

And she dates everything from that summer.

Not out loud. But if you asked her when she was closest to God, she would not have to think. And what that means, and she has never once put it this way to herself, is that she has spent nineteen years believing that the best thing that will ever happen between her and God has already happened, in a caravan park, before she could drive.

The one place this is directly forbidden

There is a sentence in Ecclesiastes that goes after the exact thing you have been doing, and it does not go after it gently.

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this.Ecclesiastes 7:10

Read the reason he gives. He does not say the question is disloyal, and he does not say it is ungrateful. He says it is not a wise enquiry. He says the question itself is badly built.

And it is. Because you are comparing a season you remember to a season you are standing in, and memory does not store a year the way a year is actually lived. It keeps the steps of the van and the walk to the sea. It does not keep the four Tuesdays in that same summer when you felt nothing at all, and you would not be able to tell me what those Tuesdays were like, because nobody keeps those.

You have been comparing an edited season to an unedited one, and no year you ever live could win that. That is not me talking you out of a memory; it is exactly why Scripture calls the question unwise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line out of Ecclesiastes and stands it up beside a woman of thirty-eight in an ordinary week.

What that summer actually was

Now I want to be careful, because I am not going to take the caravan summer away from you and you should not let anybody.

It was real. Pat's hand on your back was real. Whatever happened on that gravel was God, and I will not have it explained away as being nineteen and having nothing to lose.

But look at what you have done with it since. You made it the peak. And the moment a thing becomes the peak, everything after it is descent, by definition, no matter what it is. That is not a discovery about your life. That is arithmetic you imposed on it.

You are living in a season that was never allowed to compete on fair terms, and it has been quietly losing a rigged comparison for nineteen years. The written word says the question is unwise rather than merely sad, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been running the scoring.

Here is something else about that summer that is worth having. You were nineteen, with no plan, no job, no children, no marriage and six weeks with nothing in them. Of course you were open. Of course there was room. That is not a spiritual state you have lost. That is a schedule you no longer have.

And God is not comparing them. He is not nostalgic, He does not keep a photograph of you on a caravan step, and He has not spent nineteen years quietly missing a girl He is currently talking to.

You are the one He has, and He has never once wanted a different version. Scripture says He knows what we are made of and remembers our frame, without a note anywhere about a better year, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing said to a woman rather than a doctrine about people.