I Did Not Waste It

You are in the pantry with the light on and the door pulled most of the way to, and you are counting.

Not the jars, although you have counted the jars. Twenty-two of green beans, eleven of tomatoes, four of the pickled corn that nobody in this house but you will eat. You do this every October and it settles you. Knowing exactly what is on a shelf, and exactly how far it goes, has always settled you.

What you are actually counting tonight is the other shelf.

Because there was a year. You know the one. You could put the month on it. You went down further than anybody around here ever knew and you came back up out of it, and it was not you that did that, and you have known so from the first morning after. Somebody came and got you.

And ever since, without once deciding to, you have kept the account.

You know roughly what it cost. You know what people gave up for you that spring, and which of them quit calling afterward, and which one never did. You know how much good you have made of it since, and it is less than you meant to make. You had plans for what a woman does with a life that got handed back to her, and most of those plans are still plans.

So you have the figure. Issued once. Used, and not used well.

And now it is February and you are back in it, and you can feel the same shape of water rising around the same set of ribs, and you have been standing in this pantry the better part of an hour with the light on because you cannot get past the arithmetic.

You would have to go back and ask.

And asking means saying out loud, to God and to whoever else is in earshot, that the first one did not take. That you were pulled out of the creek and drove straight back down to the same crossing. That everything anybody spent on you the first time went nowhere.

So you count the tomatoes again.

And you do not ask.

And the water keeps coming up.

Nobody Up There Is Keeping That Ledger

I know that kind of counting from the inside. I keep books. A ledger is a good and honest tool, and a woman who knows what is on her shelf in October is not a fool, she is a steward, and I will not stand here and tell you otherwise.

But a ledger only works on things that run down. That is the whole of what it is for. And you have taken the best tool you own and turned it on the one thing in the world it cannot measure. You have not drawn anything down. Lamentations 3:22 puts the mercies of God outside arithmetic altogether, never coming to an end and new every single morning rather than drawn off yesterday's, and the Holy Spirit is standing in that pantry doorway with you while you count.

Now the verse I actually came here with, which is harder than comfort and better than it.

I will restore to you the years that the swarming locust has eaten, the hopper, the destroyer, and the cutter.Joel 2:25

Read what He names in that sentence. Not the good years. Not the ones you made something of. He names the eaten ones. The chewed, wasted, gone seasons, the ones where the thing that was planted got taken and nothing came up, and those are the exact line item He puts back.

So the years you have been sitting in the pantry counting as a loss are the years He specializes in. You were never disqualified by the eaten part. His word treats the eaten part as the thing to be restored rather than the thing to be held against a person, and the Spirit of God knows the whole figure and has never once written it in a column.

Understand what your notebook is actually doing. It is running a supply model on a Person. It assumes there was an amount, that some of it got issued to you in the spring of that year, that a portion is gone, and that what is left is what you have to work with. That is how flour behaves. That is how coal oil behaves. It is not how He behaves, and no verse anywhere in Scripture describes Him that way. You were never issued a portion in the first place, and the Spirit of God has been giving Himself away over you all these years without once checking a level.

And one plain thing said straight, because February is a hard month and this is the page it belongs on. If the water coming up has brought thoughts of ending your life with it, or of just not being here for the rest of this winter, then tell one living human being out loud tonight. A doctor, a pastor, the neighbor two farms up, an emergency line. In the United States, 988 answers a call or a text at any hour. Anywhere else, emergency services or a local crisis line will take it. That is not a failure of faith and it does not make anybody a burden. God put real rescue into human hands on purpose, and reaching for one of those hands is obedience, not defeat.

Now hear the thing about the number, because I want to be careful with you here. Nowhere does Scripture put a figure on how many times a person may be come for. You have no ceiling written over you, not a schedule, not a count kept anywhere that you or I could go and read. That number got supplied in a pantry, in the dark, by a tired woman, and heaven never issued it, and the Holy Spirit did not whisper it to anybody.

Which leaves the real ache, and it was never the going back down. It is the second asking. It is the picture of a face changing when it hears that it is you again. You have carried that picture around for weeks and it is not a picture of God, and Hebrews 4:16 says to come to the throne of grace boldly, which is a strange word to use unless somebody knew we would come back creeping. The same Spirit who wrote boldly into that sentence is in the pantry with you now.