Two Lines on the Form

The young man from the warehouse is good with forms, which is why he is at the kitchen table on a Thursday night with the tea going cold and the dates untouched, reading the questions out one at a time in the voice he uses for the delivery manifests.

"Full employment and address history for the past ten years. No unexplained gaps." He looks up. "Right. Where were you in the spring of the year your knee went?"

And the man across from him, fifty-four, applying for a job on the hospital porters' schedule because the warehouse is closing at Christmas, opens his mouth to answer and finds that he can, actually. The apartment above the shop, then the other apartment. The till at the garage, then nothing for a while, then the till at the other garage. The year of the knee. The two years he does not talk about, and the young man does not ask what was in them, only where he was living, and he was living at his brother's, so that goes in the box. It all goes in the boxes. He types it, prints it, straightens the pages, says that will do them fine, and eats a date on his way out.

It is after the door shuts that the man reads it back. Ten years. It fits into two lines. Two addresses and three jobs and a gap the form calls a gap, and it was enough for the form. The form is satisfied. He is not. He sits with the pages under the lamp and reads the two lines the way you read a sentence handed down, and the strange thing is that nobody in the room handed it down. The young man did not. The form did not. He is doing it himself, over a decade he cannot account for and cannot stop accounting.

There is a stretch like that in you. You know the dates. Somebody kind could put it into two lines and be satisfied, and you would sit there afterwards under the lamp and read the two lines as a verdict, and the only judge in the room would be you.

The tree that had already died in the dust

Say the weight plainly, because a thing unsaid gets to keep its size. It is not that the decade was hard, though it was. It is that it produced nothing you can point at. Other people's tens have a house in them, or a qualification, or a name they made. Yours has two addresses and a knee. And a voice long since stopped being noticed has been reading those years as evidence, and the evidence has been read against you, and it has been read so many times that the reading has started to feel like the fact.

Job knew that voice. He was sitting in the ash with his life reduced to two lines by everybody who visited him, and in the middle of it he said something about a tree that has nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with you.

For there is hope for a tree, if it be cut down, that it will sprout again, and that its shoots will not cease. Though its root grow old in the earth, and its stump die in the ground, yet at the scent of water it will bud and put out branches like a young plant.Job 14:7 to 9

Read what he actually said. Not that the tree was fine. He said its root had grown old and its stump had died in the dust. That is a stretch with nothing on it. He did not explain how the stump got that way, and he did not say the dying had been sent to teach the tree something. He said one thing about it: at the scent of water it buds. Not the flood. The scent. You were never the tree that had to be explained; you are the tree that gets the water.

So hear this over your decade. You have God's own word that a stump which died in the dust is not a closed account, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your bookkeeping who decides what the scent of water reaches. That is not my kindness talking. It is written in Job 14, said by a man in the ash who had earned the right to say it, and I am only reading it over you.

Not sentenced, and not explained

There is a thing well meaning people do with a barren stretch, and I want to refuse it in front of you so you know I am not doing it. They explain it. God was teaching you patience. It was preparation. Those years were the soil for what came after. Sometimes a person can look back and see something like that and it comforts them, and I do not take that away from anyone. But I am not going to tell you what your ten years were for, because I do not know, and neither does anybody who says they do. Scripture does not hand out explanations for every empty field. It hands out a God who owns the field.

Habakkuk stood in a year with nothing on it and did not explain it either.

Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord.Habakkuk 3:17 to 18

Six empty things in a row. No fig, no grape, no olive, no grain, no sheep, no cattle. He does not say why. He does not say it was deserved, or sent, or instructive. He looks straight at the whole barren list and does the one thing the list cannot stop him doing, which is to belong to God anyway and say so out loud.

You are allowed to do the same over your two lines. You do not owe anybody a reason for the decade, least of all yourself, and the God who was in it does not require one from you. That is the plain sense of the written word, and it is His Spirit who stood in the barren year with Habakkuk and stands in yours, not to explain it but to be there. The years are not on trial. They never were. Only one voice in the room ever said they were, and it was not His.

Whose decade it is

Here is the turn, and it is the whole thing. The first psalm says the tree planted by streams of water yields its fruit in its season. In its season. Not on the form's timetable, not on yours, and not inside the ten years under audit.

The years you cannot account for are His. Not because they were good, and not because they turn out to have been useful, but because He was Lord of them the whole time, on the till and off it, at your brother's, in the two you do not talk about. Nothing that belongs to Him is wasted, and that is a different claim from saying it will be made up to you. I am not promising you a harvest to cover the gap. I am telling you the gap has an owner and the owner is not counting it against you.

You were given the years by the same hand that gives seasons, and He is not finished with the tree, and the written word does not put a limit on which stump the water reaches. The Spirit who was breathing when there was nothing on the vine is the same Spirit here now, and He does not read the two lines the way you have been reading them.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes the kettle takes, tell Him about one ordinary evening out of those ten years, with nothing asked for and no account rendered. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody files that.