A Year With Nothing To Show

Manu worked harder last year than he has worked in his life, and there is nothing to point at.

That is the specific problem and it is not the same as failing. Failing is legible. If a thing collapses in an obvious way there is at least a shape to it, something you can describe in a sentence at a table, and people know what to say and they say it and the moment passes.

This was not that. It was a year of genuine, sustained, competent work on something that simply did not come out, for reasons that were partly circumstance and partly timing and partly a set of things nobody could have known in advance, and at the end of it there is no object, no result, and nothing anybody could photograph.

So when somebody asks him what he did last year, and they do ask, in the ordinary way people ask, he has nothing to hand them.

He has tried a few answers. All of them are true and all of them sound like excuses, which is the thing that has begun to get to him. He has stopped offering the long version and now says something short and moves the conversation on, and he has become quite skilled at it, and he does not like the skill.

He sat down at the edge of the water one evening after everybody had gone up, and what came was not about money.

It was: I do not know how to count a year that produced nothing.

Now I want to stay right here rather than hurrying, because this is a wound and hurrying past a wound is how a message stops being any use to anybody.

There is a particular emptiness in an unmarked year. It is not grief exactly, and it does not qualify as a disaster, and that is precisely what makes it hard to carry, because nobody sends anything and there is no occasion for it. There is only a man with twelve months in him that he cannot describe.

And I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not once, anywhere on this page. Whether the year came apart through your doing or somebody else's or nobody's makes no difference to a single word here, and there is no point at which you have to account for anything.

And nobody here is going to tell you God was teaching you something in it. I do not know that, nobody does, and that sentence has done real damage to good people standing at exactly this spot.

You have your own version. There is a stretch of your life with nothing on the other side of it that anybody can see.

God speaks about eaten years, and He counts them

There is a sentence in Joel that people quote quickly, and the striking thing about it is that it exists at all.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten.Joel 2:25

Stop on the phrase before the promise. The years that the locust hath eaten.

God says that. He puts it in the record, out loud, that there were years that got eaten. He does not say they were secretly productive. He does not say they were a season of hidden growth or that the people involved were being refined and should look at it differently. He calls them eaten, which is the honest word, and it is His word rather than theirs.

That is the part I would want if I were you. Before anything is offered, the loss is named accurately by God Himself.

And now hear what is already true over you. Your year is counted. That is not my sympathy: the written word has God naming eaten years as eaten, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land on a man sitting at the edge of the water after everybody has gone up.

And He is not asking you to reinterpret it. The word does not instruct anybody to find the silver lining in the locusts, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person stop performing that particular piece of arithmetic, which is exhausting and which almost everybody demands of a man in your position.

Now, the promise in that verse is His and it is real, and I am going to be careful with it, because it is not mine to hand you on a timetable. God says what He says there and He will do what He does, in His own way and at His own hour, and anybody who tells you what that will look like in your life is guessing. What I can tell you is what is written, and that is that He is not a God who considers an eaten year beneath His notice.

Your welcome was never priced

Here is what this whole category exists to say, and this article needs it in a specific form.

Nothing about how you are received depends on what you have to show.

And you are not measured by output. Not in either direction: the word says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a statement about family rather than about a year's results.

And your standing did not move when the year came out empty. The word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, and every clause of that is shutting a door on the idea that anybody's place was ever a matter of what they produced.

You were not worth more the year the work came out. You only felt like you were.