The Decade I Was Not at the Table

He counted them in the car, which is a bad place to count anything.

He had the engine running because it was cold and he was early, and he was outside his sister's house looking at the lights in the front window, and he started counting the ones he missed.

Ten. He had thought it was seven or eight. It is ten.

He is fifty two and there is a stretch in the middle of his life, from about thirty eight to forty eight, that he does not have a name for. There was a thing with money and there was a thing that got said, and then there was the long part after both of those, which is the part nobody talks about, where nothing dramatic is happening and you simply are not there.

He was in the same country. That is the piece that is hardest to explain to anybody, including himself. He was ninety minutes away. He was not in prison, he was not ill, he was not overseas. He just did not come, and every year it got fractionally harder to come, and then one year it had been so long that coming would have been an event, and he could not face being an event, so he did not come, and that was year seven.

They asked him back. Twice, that he knows of, and possibly more, because his mother was not a woman who told you everything she had tried.

And now he goes. He has gone for four years. It is fine. It is more than fine, it is good, and that is somehow the problem, because good makes the hole visible in a way that the bad years did not.

There are eight of them in there tonight. He can see his aunt through the window with her arms going, telling something. And he is in a car with the engine running counting Christmases, and what he keeps arriving at is not guilt exactly, it is subtraction: ten of these, gone, out of a life that only has so many, and there is no way to describe them except as a hole cut out of the middle.

You have that stretch. It might not be Christmases. It might be a friendship, a church, a father, a place you stopped going. And the counting is the thing that has hold of you. And there is a psalm about exactly this that everybody misreads, because they read the end of it and skip the middle.

Precious while the weeping is going on

I have to be careful here, more careful than usual, because there is a version of this that arrives with a reason. God used those years. It made a better man of him. Everything works together. I am not going to say any of that. Scripture does not explain his ten years, and I am not going to invent something and put God's name on it.

Psalm 126 is a short psalm written by people who have come back from somewhere, and everybody quotes the last verse without reading the one in front of it.

They that sow in tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him (Psalm 126:5-6).

Look at where the word precious sits. It is not attached to the sheaves at the end. It is attached to the seed, in the hands of a man who is described, in the same clause, as weeping. The seed is called precious while he is still going out and while he is still crying.

You were carrying something the Spirit calls precious through the years you have written off as a hole. That is not a rearrangement of the psalm; Psalm 126:6 puts precious seed and weepeth in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that ordering did it so that nobody would have to wait for the harvest before the going out counted.

And notice what the psalm does not do. It does not explain why they were away. It does not say the exile was for something. It says they went out weeping and it calls what they carried precious, and that is the whole of the account it gives.

He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.Psalm 126:6

The counting is the part that hurts

Now the thing that is actually happening in that car.

He is not being convicted. That is worth saying clearly, because a man sitting outside a house doing arithmetic about his own absence will assume that God is the one running the numbers. The counting started at about year four and it has never once produced anything except more counting.

You have been forgiven for things you are still subtracting. Psalm 103:12 says as far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us, and east from west is a distance chosen because it does not close; the Spirit who inspired that line does not run a tally that God has already dropped.

This is yours right now, with the engine running: a place in that room that ten absences did not repeal. Ephesians 2:19 says you are no more a stranger and a foreigner, but a fellow citizen with the saints and of the household of God, and household is a word about belonging rather than about attendance; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) is in the car and in the house.

What is under the counting

Let me name the sentence, because it is not remorse and it is not sentimentality about Christmas.

It sounds like this: I took ten years off a life that only has so many, and there is no getting them back, and everybody at that table is being polite about it. That is the fear, and the last clause is the sharpest part of it, and he has never said any of it out loud to one of them.

You were held through all ten of those years, and He did not leave the room you were in. Psalm 139:8 says that if he makes his bed in hell, God is there, which is the psalmist reaching for the furthest place he can imagine and finding it occupied; the Holy Spirit who inspired that psalm was ninety minutes away in an apartment with the television on.

Fruit is not output, and a family table is where you can see the difference. Output is the attendance: ten missed, four made, a count anybody could keep. Fruit is what has grown on a man who drove back after seven years knowing it would be an event and did it anyway, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that meekness and part of it faithfulness, and there is no column for either.

And I want to be plain: I am not telling you those ten years were for something. I do not know why they went the way they did. What can be said, and only this, is that what you carried through them was called precious by the Spirit while the weeping was still going on, and that the years were not outside His hand.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the drive you already make, tell Him about one ordinary evening out of those ten years that produced nothing anybody could name. A room. A television left on. Something you thought and did not say. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody counts that.