She kept them. That is the part she cannot fully account for.
Four wall calendars, in a box, in the bottom of a wardrobe. The kind with a photograph on top and a grid underneath, and every square of every grid has something in it, and none of it is what a calendar is supposed to have in it.
Appointment. Bloods. Appointment. A row of crosses for a week she does not remember at all. Somebody else's handwriting for two months in the middle, because for a while she was not doing the writing.
No birthdays in the wrong color ink. No weekends away. One wedding, marked and not attended, which she has never mentioned to the couple.
She calls them the four years I lost. She says it at parties, lightly, and everybody nods, and it is genuinely the fastest way to explain a gap in a life to somebody who has not had one.
But that is not what the sentence is doing to her. She has said it so often that it has become the settled description, and a settled description works on a person quietly, and what it has settled into is this: there is a hole in the middle of my life and I will always be four years behind wherever I was going.
You know that sentence. It might be illness, or caring for somebody, or a stretch of years that a court or a diagnosis or another person's crisis took out of you. There is a gap in your life. You have a light phrase for it that you use in company. Underneath the light phrase there is an arithmetic that never stops running.
Restore is not the same word as rewind
There is one verse people say to somebody with years like yours, and it is worth being careful with, because it has been used badly.
And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25
That was said to a nation that had watched four kinds of locust go through everything it had. God does not, in that chapter, explain the locusts away or say they were secretly a blessing. He does not undo them either. Nobody in Joel gets their four years back on the calendar.
What He promises is restoration, which in that book looks like fullness in the years that come, and His presence in the middle of the people, and a name they will not be ashamed of. It is not a rewind. Nothing in Scripture is a rewind.
You are held by a God who restores, and He has never once needed to erase four years in order to do it. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing I have chosen for a woman with a box in a wardrobe, and the Holy Spirit who was in you through every appointment in those grids is the evidence that you were not absent from your own life during them.
Watch what that does to the arithmetic. If restoring is what He does, then four calendars is information about an illness with a name and a course and a great deal of paperwork. It is not a hole in the middle of you, and it never had the standing to become that.
Nobody here will tell you what those years were for
Here is the second thing, and this is where a great deal of damage usually gets done.
People will tell you. They mean it kindly. God was teaching you to rest. God was slowing you down. God was preparing you for something. And every one of those sentences quietly makes an illness into a curriculum somebody signed you up for, and that is not in the text and it is not true and it has made a lot of sick people feel worse.
This site will not say any of it. What Scripture says is that God wastes nothing and that no one can trace out what He is doing, and those two together are enough to stand on and small enough to be honest.
You have been carried through all four of those years, including the two months in somebody else's handwriting, and the carrying did not go quiet when you did. 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 on the days you have no memory of.
There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is asking you to catch up. Nothing here is telling you the next four years will be different, or that you will make up ground, because nobody can promise that and this site does not.
This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a wardrobe. 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 carried lightly at parties. And the thing in the way is not the illness. It is a sentence: there is a hole in the middle of my life. 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 kneeling at a wardrobe. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how well you are today.
If this has taken you somewhere darker than grief, 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.
So. The wardrobe, the box, four grids full of the wrong kind of writing.
Take one calendar out and hold it open in both hands. Actually do it, the way you would hold a hymn book. Not to read the squares. Just to hold four of your own years without flinching for a minute.
Say out loud the phrase you use at parties. Once, plainly, without the lightness on it, because that phrase has been doing work in the dark and saying it in the daylight takes some of that away.
Then say one sentence naming who restores. Not what those years were for, because nobody knows and nothing here is going to invent it, and God has never asked anybody to justify their own lost time. Just who restores. One sentence, then put it back in the box or leave it out.
You are not a woman with a hole in the middle of her life, you are a woman held by a God who restores and who never needed to erase four years to do it. That is the word's account of those calendars rather than my kind version of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who was with you in every square of every grid.
Declare this over yourself
Speak these out loud with the calendar still in your hands. You stand in Christ, and Scripture is what makes these words a declaration rather than a wish, and the Holy Spirit carries them rather than however well you are this week. What God does with those years, and what the next ones hold, is His to decide, and He is not asking you to make anything up.
- Four calendars in a box, you are not the record of a wasted life. Joel says God restores the years the locust ate, and He never once promised to rewind them, and you are four grids of appointments in the wrong ink.
- Sentence that says there is a hole in the middle of me, you have no place in my mouth, and I put you out in the name of Jesus. Scripture says His Spirit was in me on the days I cannot remember, so I was never absent from my own life.
- Lord, You restore and You do not need to erase anything to do it, and I am standing in that this morning with four of my own years open in my hands. I thank You, because Your Spirit was with me in every appointment on every grid, and I am putting the lid back on without an audit.
Joel 2:25
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