Nineteen to Twenty Nine

She was in the parking garage of the same hospital, level four, and it was the first time she had noticed the numbers painted on the pillars.

Level four, section C. There is a stencil of a bird on the pillar by the elevator, which somebody presumably did as a joke about ten years ago. She knows this parking garage the way other people know a route to work, and she had never once looked at any of it.

She was twenty nine when it ended and she is thirty one now, and the reason she is here today is somebody else entirely, a friend having a small thing done, and she is early, and she is sitting in her car in level four with the engine off.

A woman at a birthday thing last month had asked her, kindly and with total innocence, what she got up to in her twenties.

She has been carrying that question around for five weeks.

Because there is an answer and the answer is unusable. Nineteen to twenty nine. Appointments. A folder that became two folders. The phone number of a ward memorized, and then a different ward, and then the same one again. Learning what the different beeps mean. Being the person who asks the question that nobody else in the family will ask. Sleeping in a chair that reclines about eleven degrees. Ten years of that, and there is not one year of it that she could hand to a stranger at a party in a sentence, because every sentence she has ever tried either turns into an apology or makes the other person's face do something she cannot stand.

So she said, oh, nothing much, and the woman said something nice and moved on, and it took five weeks for that to stop being a small moment and start being a large one.

The light in a parking garage at this time of day comes in sideways off the ramp and lands in one long strip, and there is a bird stenciled on a pillar, and she is sitting in a car with the engine off wondering where a decade went.

You have that decade, or that stretch, or those four years. Somewhere in your life is a block of time you cannot hand anybody. And the sentence you cannot find is not the problem. The problem is that you have accepted the job of accounting for it, and Scripture never gave you that job.

The verse does not explain anything

I have to be careful right at the start, and more careful here than almost anywhere, because there is a version of this that arrives with a reason. Those years shaped the person now reading this. God was preparing her. It was not wasted because look what you learned. I am not going to say any of that, and not because it would be unkind. Because Scripture does not say it about her decade, and I am not permitted to invent an explanation and put God's name on it.

Here is what Scripture does say. David, in a psalm written from inside actual trouble, with his strength failing and his years spent with grieving and his acquaintances avoiding him in the street, says this: he trusted in the Lord, and he named Him as his God, and then, My times are in thy hand (Psalm 31:14-15).

My times are in thy hand. Not my times make sense. Not my times will be explained. Not my times will be paid back with interest. They are in His hand, which is a statement about location and about custody and about nothing else, and it is enough, and David does not add to it.

You are holding a decade that has been in His hand the whole time you have been trying to account for it. That is not me softening the psalm; Psalm 31:15 says my times are in thy hand and stops there, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that line did not attach a reason to it, which means nobody after him is obliged to produce one.

And look at where the verse sits. Verse 10 says his life is spent with grief and his years with sighing. He is not writing from the far side with everything resolved. The times are in God's hand while they are still terrible.

But I trusted in thee, O LORD: I said, Thou art my God. My times are in thy hand.Psalm 31:14-15

Nobody is asking you to account for it

Now the thing that has actually been happening for five weeks.

A stranger at a party asked a light question and she took it as a summons. She has been in a witness box ever since, preparing testimony about ten years, trying to find a form of words that will make a decade legible to somebody eating a canape.

There is no such form of words. There was never going to be. And the reason it cannot be done is not that the years were empty. It is that they were dense, and unphotographable, and nearly all of the substance of them was in a room with two people in it.

You have never been under any obligation to make those years presentable. 1 Corinthians 4:3 has Paul saying it is a very small thing that he should be judged by anybody, or by any human standard, and the Spirit who carried that into the letter freed him from a courtroom nobody had actually convened.

This is yours right now, in a car on level four: a decade that is already accounted for somewhere else. Psalm 56:8 says God puts our tears in His bottle and asks whether they are not in His book, and the account exists and it is His and you are not required to produce a copy of it; the same Spirit who inspired that psalm has been keeping it since you were nineteen.

What she is actually afraid of

Let me name the sentence under the five weeks, because it is not embarrassment about small talk.

It sounds like this: if I cannot describe those years, maybe nothing happened in them, and if nothing happened in them, then I gave a decade to nothing. That is the fear. It is specific and it is cruel and it has never been said to another human being.

You were not in an empty room, and something was happening in every one of those years. Isaiah 43:2 says when you pass through the waters, I will be with thee, and the promise is presence rather than explanation; the Holy Spirit who carried that into the book was in the chair that reclines eleven degrees.

Fruit is not output, and a decade in hospitals is where the difference is sharpest. Output is what could be said at a party: a job, a house, a place you went. Fruit is what grew on a young woman who learned to ask the question nobody else would ask, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that gentleness and part of it longsuffering, and none of it can be handed over in a sentence at a birthday.

And here is what I am not going to tell you: I am not going to tell you those years were for that. I do not know why they went the way they went. Nobody reading this to you knows. What can be said, and only this, is that the Spirit was not absent from them and the years were in His hand, and neither of those claims requires a reason to be true.