The Eleven Years I Call Wasted

He was twenty-two when he stopped and thirty-three when he came back and he calls the middle part the wasted years.

He says it easily. It is not a confession, it is a filing label, and he has used it so long that people who know him use it too. His wife says it. His pastor said it from the front once, kindly, as a compliment.

The wasted years. Eleven of them, and he can name every one.

What was in those eleven years: a marriage that failed and one that started, two children, a business that went under, four years of night shifts, the death of his father, a friendship with a man called Ray that is the closest he has ever had to anybody, and about nine hundred conversations he would now say were the making of him.

He does not count any of that. It is all filed under the label.

And here is the piece that sits underneath, which he has never said out loud and would find difficult.

He does not believe the eleven years are forgiven. He believes they are covered, which is different, and he can tell you the difference precisely: covered means everybody has agreed not to look, and he has spent twelve years being extremely useful in the hope that the arithmetic eventually comes out.

He was watching the road

I want to name the injury first, because you have been handed that word by a room and you have carried it as though it were a diagnosis.

Wasted is not a word from Scripture about you. It is a word from a culture that likes a clean before and after, and it needs your eleven years to be a black rectangle so the story reads properly at a table.

Your father died in there. Your children were born in there. Ray is in there.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as comfort: the years between are not a hole in your life, and there is one clause in the most famous of those stories that tells you what was happening while you were away. That is not my kindness talking, it is what stands written in the fifteenth chapter of Luke, and the same Holy Spirit who has been dealing with you for twelve years was not absent for the eleven.

Read the clause. It is easy to read past and it is the whole thing.

But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.Luke 15:20

While he was still a long way off, his father saw him.

A man does not see somebody a long way off unless he is looking. And a man does not look down a road once. That detail is not decoration: it tells you what the father had been doing for the entire duration of the absence, which is watching the place his son would appear.

The son had a speech ready. He never finishes it. The father interrupts a prepared confession with an embrace, which is the exact opposite of arithmetic.

So take this now rather than after the ledger balances: those years were not unattended, because the written word puts the father watching the road for the whole time and running before a word of the speech is delivered, and the Spirit of God was present in a night shift and a hospital and a friendship with a man called Ray.

And the guard, because there is a cheap way to say this and it would be a lie.

Nothing here says the eleven years were fine, or secretly a plan, or that the marriage that failed did not fail. It did, and people were hurt, and some of that you cannot mend and you know exactly which parts.

What is written simply refuses to call the absence empty, and the Holy Spirit does not need a man to earn back a decade before He will deal with him.