The Years Nobody Wrote About

She has been stacking the same four chairs for eleven years.

Upstairs room, over what used to be a hardware shop and is now nothing. Tuesdays, seven until eight. Four chairs, a card table, and a thermos she fills at half past six because the kettle up there died in her third winter and nobody ever replaced it. Bernard comes when his hip lets him. Marie comes every week and prays with her eyes open, watching the ceiling. The fourth chair has held nine different people over the years and holds nobody at the moment, and she puts it out anyway.

Downstairs the shutter is down. The street is empty by seven. The town has about six thousand people in it and most of them have never once thought about that room.

She reads about the other kind of years. She has a whole shelf of it. Towns where the shops closed on their own because nobody could think about anything else. A valley singing at four in the morning. Ledgers where the handwriting goes wobbly halfway down a page because the man writing it kept having to stop.

She loves those books. She puts one down, and looks at the four chairs, and something in her goes flat.

She has never said out loud what it is, because it would sound ungrateful and she is not ungrateful. But here it is. She thinks she was born into the wrong decades. Not that God is absent, she would argue with you about that for an hour. It is that she suspects her own years are the filler between other people's chapters, and that when the whole thing is read back, hers will be the eleven that get summarized in half a line, if that.

Last Tuesday she was putting the chairs away and the lid of the piano stool was loose, so she opened it.

Two hymn books with the covers gone. And under them, a notebook. Blue, soft with damp, the corners furred. Names down the left hand side in a round careful hand that belonged to nobody she had ever met, and a date beside each one, and beside some of the names a second date years later with a single word written next to it.

The first dates started forty one years before she was born.

Same room. Same night of the week. Somebody had sat where she sits, with a list, on a Tuesday, for years and years, and then had put the book in the stool and gone.

She sat down on the floor and did not get up for a long time.

She had thought she was keeping something going. She was not. She had walked into the middle of something and picked up one end of it. There had been hands on it before hers, she had never known their names, and the room she had been calling small had a line running through it that went back further than she could see in either direction, and forward too.

The day of small beginnings

There was a morning when a foundation got laid and the people wept at how small it was.

They had heard about the old house. Some of them were old enough to have stood in it. And what they were looking at now, on a cleared site with a working crew and a rope line, was so much less than the thing in their memory that the crying and the shouting got mixed up together and you could not tell one from the other at any distance.

Into that morning, God asked a question. It is not the question anybody expected, and it has teeth in it.

Who has despised the day of small beginnings? They will rejoice when they see the plumb line in the hand of Zerubbabel. These seven are the eyes of the Lord, and they range over the whole earth.Zechariah 4, verse 10

He does not defend the size of the site. He does not promise a crowd. He asks who has been doing the despising.

And then He points at one man's hand.

Not at the building. Not at the finished thing, not at the day it fills up, not at the year the singing starts. At a plumb line, held by a working man, on an ordinary morning, on a job that looked like nothing to everybody standing at the rope.

A plumb line is a weight on a string. It does one job. It tells you whether the wall you are laying is true. It cannot make the wall go faster, it cannot make the wall famous, and it cannot tell you when the roof goes on. It can only tell you that what you are laying now is straight, and that is the whole of what it is for. Scripture puts that tool into a hand in a small season on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who does the building.

Those seven eyes range over the whole earth. Range, not scan. It is a word about a search that misses nothing, and in that verse the search finds a man with a string and a weight in his hand at a site nobody was writing about.

Here is the thing I want to put into your hands and then leave alone.

The years you have read about came down like weather. Nobody in those books arranged one. Nobody qualified for one. Nowhere is it written that a quiet decade is a verdict on the people living in it, and I am not going to be the first to say it, because it is not true and it would be cruel and it would also be nonsense. Earlier in that same chapter God says the whole thing runs not by force and not by human strength but by His Spirit, which means the one thing it has never run on is somebody's performance in the waiting.

So the flatness you feel is not a diagnosis. It is grief. You are grieving something you have never seen, which is one of the loneliest kinds there is, and it is not a sin and it is not a failure of gratitude. You can love those books and still be sad. Both of those are allowed to be true in you at once.

But there is one thing you are not required to carry, and it is the one that has been quietly eating your Tuesdays. Scripture never once laid it on anybody, and His Spirit is not asking you to hold it.

You do not have to despise these years.