Only One Of Us Is Counting

It is the old song, the one everybody in the room learned in the same decade, and the whole floor has its arms up. Somebody's uncle is doing the thing with his elbows. A bridesmaid has her shoes hooked over two fingers. You are in the middle of it with your hands in the air and every single word coming out of your mouth in the right order, and you have not missed a syllable.

And then, mid chorus, you notice yourself doing it.

Not stopping. You keep going, because it would be strange to stop, and anyway the chorus comes round again. But something in you has stepped half a pace to the side and is watching, and what it says is not cruel and not loud. It just says: you know all the words, and you are not here. And you realize, with the bass still going through the floor, that this is not the first time. That you have been doing this exact thing, correctly, warmly, for a long while now. Being at the wedding. Singing every word.

Outside, on the steps, with your shoes in your hand and the noise going quiet behind the door, the seeing turns into arithmetic almost immediately. You start reaching backwards for the edge of it, for the last thing that properly landed, and you cannot find where it starts. That is the part that hurts. Not the flatness. The reaching back and the not finding.

There are two people looking back tonight

Before the reaching goes any further, hear this. You are awake right now, and that is God's doing and not a lucky accident on a warm night. What is written about Him says He is the one who opens eyes, and it is His Spirit and not your own effort who has just moved something in you on a set of steps outside a reception. The waking is His kindness. That is the whole nature of it.

And I want to put something beside your counting, because there are two people looking back over that stretch tonight, and only one of them is doing sums.

You are running down the years, trying to work out how much you have been absent for, what it cost, who noticed, what you owe. That is what a person does when the light comes on, and the Spirit who turned it on is not the one handing you the calculator. It feels like honesty. It is very close to honesty. But look at what God is doing while He looks back over exactly the same ground.

As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.Psalm 103:13-14

He remembers what you are made of.

Not as an excuse handed down to a person who did not measure up. As the ground of how He deals with you, written into the psalm as the reason and carried to you now by His Spirit. When God looks over the sleeping stretch of a life He is not totting up hours; He is remembering, with tenderness, that He made a creature out of dust who gets tired, who goes quiet after hard things, who can be worn down by a thousand ordinary weights and go on functioning perfectly while it happens. He has never once been surprised by that. You have been carrying it as a character flaw. He has been holding it as the reason for His gentleness.

He is not sending an account

So the arithmetic can stop, and I mean tonight, on the steps, before you get home.

You have been handed nothing to settle, and the waking was never the opening of a case. The Lord who said through Joel that He restores the years is the same Lord who says the sea has already swallowed what was against you, and the word never once puts those two things in tension. Restoring is what He does with years. Charging for them is not, and the Spirit who woke you did not wake you in order to open a case.

Notice how this goes wrong, because it goes wrong in a very particular way. A person wakes up, sees the stretch, and immediately converts the waking into a verdict: I have wasted something. Then the verdict does what verdicts do. It makes the waking feel like bad news. And a waking that feels like bad news is one a heart will quietly decide it would rather not have, and back it goes, not out of rebellion but out of self protection.

That is why this matters. You are not being shown the length of it so you can grieve it. You are being shown it so you can see that Someone stayed through the whole thing. Read the account of Jacob at Bethel, waking up and saying that the Lord was in this place and he did not know it. Notice what he does not say. He does not say: and I have wasted the night. He says: surely He was here. The presence was the discovery, not the absence.

He was in the rooms you sang in and did not feel. He was in the years you would struggle to describe. You have not been out of His company for a single one of them, and that is the true thing about the stretch, whatever else is also true about it. The word says His Spirit has no edge to reach and nowhere to be absent from, and that is not poetry, it is the plainest fact about where you have been.

And if the flatness underneath tonight is heavier than a flat season, if there are hours when staying here at all feels like too much, please tell one real person today and let them stay near you. If it goes further than that, call or text 988 in the United States, or your local emergency number wherever you are, tonight. That is not a failure of anything. It is exactly how God has always sent help, through people who turn up.