The Years I Counted Against Myself

He can tell you the number without thinking about it. Eleven.

Eleven years between the last time he darkened a door as a young man and the Tuesday night he came back in at forty-one, wet through, and sat at the end of a row.

That was nineteen years ago now. Nineteen years of showing up. Nineteen years of being the man who does the run to the tip and drives the minibus and sits with the ones nobody else can sit with.

And every single time something moves in that room, the sum runs.

Nobody taught him to do it. It just runs, the way a well-worn engine turns over: nineteen good ones, eleven bad ones, and He knows what the eleven were. And by the time the sum has finished running, whatever was moving has moved on, and he is standing there with his hands at his sides doing arithmetic.

I asked him once what he thought the eleven years had cost him.

He said, without looking up: not heaven. I know I have got heaven. It cost me the front.

Meaning he believes, entirely sincerely, that a man with eleven years like his is a man who serves from the back and is grateful, and that the ones who get poured on are the ones whose accounts are cleaner.

Now put him down a minute.

What number do you subtract from yourself every time God moves in a room?

God brought the eaten years up first

Here is a thing worth knowing about the outpouring promise, and almost nobody notices it because we quote the famous part and stop.

The words I will pour out My Spirit on all people come in the second chapter of Joel. And three verses earlier, in the same speech, out of the same mouth, God says this.

I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten, the great locust and the young locust, the other locusts and the locust swarm.Joel 2:25

Four kinds of locust. He names them separately, which is the detail I cannot get past. He is not waving at a general misfortune. He is itemizing, the way a man itemizes what came off a field, because He knows exactly what went and in what order.

And then, a few lines later, He pours out His Spirit on all people.

So the sequence in the passage is the opposite of the sequence in your head. In your head, the eaten years are the reason the outpouring is not really for you. In Joel, God raises the eaten years Himself, out loud, unprompted, and He raises them as something on His account rather than on yours, and then He pours out on everybody.

Nobody had to confess the locusts to get Him onto the subject. He brought them up.

And now hear where you are standing, and hear it plain, because you have been doing sums for nineteen years.

You are not a man with a deduction. Scripture says God spoke about the eaten years Himself, and the Holy Spirit never once been handed your ledger to check before He fell on a room.

There is no ledger. That is the difficult part for a working man, because a working man knows that accounts are real and that what you take out has to be put back. It is true of a field. It is true of a bank. It is not true here, and it is the one place in your whole life where it is not, which is exactly why it takes so long to believe.

Let me say it the other way round, since I am plainer that way.

The eleven years are not a secret you are keeping from God, which He tolerates. They are a thing He raised first, in the same breath as the promise, four kinds of locust, itemized.

And the fire this house is named for fell in a stable in Los Angeles in 1906 on a room full of people whose accounts were not clean and had never been clean. Domestic workers. Men off the boats. People three weeks out of trouble. The Spirit fell on the room, and not one person in it had been audited first.