A Decade In A Shoebox

The lid is the problem. It has been off for forty minutes and she has sorted about nine photographs.

There is a system. There was going to be a system. Keep, bin, ask her sister. And what has actually happened is that she has made one pile, and the pile is on the floor beside her, and she is not looking at it directly, the way you do not look directly at a bruise while you press it.

They are all from the same stretch. She can date them within about a year by her own hair.

She has a name for those years. She has never said it to anybody and she says it to herself constantly: the lost decade. The one where she was with the wrong person, in the wrong town, doing a job she cannot explain to anybody now, and where nothing was built, and nothing was kept, and she came out the other side at thirty-four with a bag and a borrowed car.

Here is the specific thing that is happening on the floor. She keeps finding photographs where she is laughing. Genuinely, wide open, head back. And every one of those is worse than the sad ones, because a person is not allowed to have been happy in a decade she has written off. It ruins the filing.

You have a decade. Or a stretch of years, or one very long season. You have a word for it, and it is not a kind word, and it is doing a great deal of work in you. There is a period you have quietly agreed with yourself to call lost, and you have been living downstream of that agreement ever since.

The verse that refuses to explain itself

There is a famous line in a very strange book of the Bible, and it is usually printed on things with a sunset behind it, which is a shame, because it is much tougher than that.

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.Ecclesiastes 3:11

Read both halves, because everybody prints the first and drops the second. Half one: He makes everything beautiful in its time. Half two: and no man can find out what God is doing, from the beginning to the end.

So the same sentence that promises the beauty forbids the explanation. Which means nobody, including me, gets to stand over your decade and tell you what it was for. Anybody who has tried has been going beyond what is written, and it usually made things worse.

What the verse does say is that the whole of it is in the hands of somebody who is working on a timescale you cannot see the ends of.

You are inside a work of God that covers the decade you have written off, and that work did not skip those years or hold its breath through them. That is what the written word says over you and not a comforting frame I have chosen for a woman on a carpet, and the Holy Spirit who is in you this afternoon is the evidence that nothing about you was ever set aside as unusable.

Watch what that does to the filing system. If the times are in His hands, then a decade in a shoebox is information about a wrong town and a wrong person and a job with no name. It is not a verdict on your life, and it never had the standing to become one.

Nobody appointed you the auditor

Here is the second thing, and it is where the weight comes off.

Somewhere around thirty-four you took a job nobody offered you: assessor of your own years. Sorting them into productive and wasted, and running the totals, and finding yourself short. And the whole exercise has an assumption inside it, which is that a life is a ledger and that a decade with nothing to show is a debit.

Scripture does not run your life as a ledger. It never once totals a person up.

You have been carried through every year in that box, including the ones you cannot look at directly, and the carrying did not pause for a decade. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit who was at work in you in the wrong town rather than waiting for you to get to a better one.

There is something worth saying very plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could go wrong and will not. Nothing here is going to tell you what those years were for. Nothing here is going to say God was preparing you, or building character, or that you would not be who you are without them. Those sentences are said kindly and they are not in Scripture and they hurt people, because they turn a decade of real loss into a training exercise that somebody arranged.

What is in Scripture is smaller and much stronger: He wastes nothing, and nobody can trace out what He is doing.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a nice idea on a living room floor. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not muttered at a photograph. And the thing in the way is not the wrong person and it is not the town. It is two words: the lost decade. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority sitting on a carpet with a shoebox. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much you meant them.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than regret, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.