The Gate He Never Walks Through

There are two ways from the house to the top forty and everybody who has ever worked that place knows it.

The short one is out the yard, along the hedge, and through the gate at the top of the near field. Four minutes if you are not hurrying.

The long one goes down the lane, right at the culvert, up the track past the old sheep pens and in through the corner. Nineteen minutes, and in February it is mud to the ankle the whole way.

Walter has taken the long one for thirty one years.

He would tell you the near gate drags. It does drag, a little, on the far side where the ground has come up. He fixed the hinge in 2011 and it still drags and he could fix the ground in an afternoon with the tractor and he has not.

Nobody has ever asked. His son works with him now and takes the short way and thinks nothing of it, and if you asked the son whether his father takes the long way he would have to think about it, and then he would say yes, actually, come to think of it.

Something happened at that gate a very long time ago. Something was done, and Walter was not the one who did it, and that is all I am going to say about it, and this article will never ask him, or you, for one word more.

Thirty one years of nineteen minutes.

I want to be clear about who I am writing to, because on this site that comes first.

I am not writing to a man who did a thing and cannot get the sense of it off. That reader is real, and there are pieces here written carefully for him, and this is not one.

I am writing to the person carrying a shame that came out of what another person did.

And before we go on: it was not yours. Nothing about you was a factor. Nothing in this article is going to circle back and ask you to check that, because there is nothing there to check.

He names the locust

Here is the promise, and it is one of the best sentences in the prophets.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army.

Now notice what God spends His words on.

He names the locust. Then He names it three more times under three more headings, and if you read the chapter before it you find He has been naming it for two chapters. He is very specific about the cause. He goes into detail about the cause. He will not let anybody be vague about what came through and ate the years.

And now notice what He never once does.

He never turns to the farmer. There is not a line in that promise about how the land should have been worked, or whether the man was watching, or what he might have done differently in the spring. Nowhere in it does God suggest that a person who has been through a locust year needs to examine his own husbandry before the restoring can begin.

The cause is named, in four words, and it is external, and the man is not in the sentence except as the one being restored to.

You are inside a promise where the cause is named and it is not you, and God took four words to be sure of it. Joel 2:25 names the locust and never once names the farmer, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written assignment of cause and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much you can feel it at the top of a field.

And I will say this here because it belongs early. Nothing in that promise waits behind you forgiving anybody. Not on a schedule, not as a condition, not at all. What is between you and whoever acted is yours and God's at whatever pace is yours, and it stands in front of nothing in this verse.

You have a restoring with no condition standing in front of it, and nothing you have not managed yet is holding it back. It is written with the cause assigned and no clause attached, and His Spirit is the one carrying an unconditional thing into a life, which is why the state does not move with anybody's progress.

Restore is an accounting word

Now the verb, because it is not a farming word at all.

The word behind restore is shalam, and it is the same root as shalom. In this form it means to make whole by paying in full. It is the word used for a man who has to make good a loss, in the exact and legal sense: not partly, not with an apology, not with a gesture, but paid out to the full value of what was lost.

So God is not saying He will help a man recover. He is saying He is settling the account personally, at full value, on a loss He did not cause.

Which is an extraordinary thing for the one paying to be. He did not send the locust into that field for the man's instruction. He calls it His great army in the sense that everything is finally under His hand, and then He turns around and pays out the whole of it as though the debt were His.

You have an account being settled at full value by somebody who was never the debtor. Scripture uses the word for making a loss good in full, and the same Spirit at work through that whole passage is the one testifying inside a person now.

Let me put this here, in the middle, in plain sight, and say it as warmly as I can. Getting a person alongside you is part of what God is doing and it is not the smaller road. Ring your doctor. Sit down with a counselor who knows this ground. You do not have to describe a thing to make that appointment and a good one will never ask. And if the nights have gotten long, if the thinking has traveled past the ache and out toward wishing to be gone, call or text 988 or a crisis line tonight and let another human being be in it with you. That is not a soft spot in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people.

The years, not the harvest

And here is the part that undoes me, and it is one word.

I will restore to you the years.

Not the crop. Not the yield. Not the value of the harvest that was lost, which is what any court would award and what any reasonable man would settle for.

The years.

Time is the one thing nobody can give back. Every other loss has a replacement somewhere. A man can grow another crop. He cannot grow another 1994. And God, offering terms, reaches straight past everything that could be replaced and names the one item that cannot be.

I do not entirely know what that means and I am not going to pretend I do. What I know is which item He chose to name, and a man does not name that item unless he intends to be taken seriously about it.

You have the years themselves on the settlement, and God named the one line nobody else could have paid. Joel 2:25 says years and not harvest, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a person.

And I am not going to tell you that you take the short way tomorrow. I have no right to hand you that. If I gave you a date and you missed it you would file it as one more failing, and there is nothing here to fail at. Nineteen minutes is not sin and it is not unbelief.

You are clean right now, out on the long track in the mud, and the long track has never once been a witness. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.