Two Anniversaries, One Month

Both are in October and they are eleven days apart.

Keoni knows this better than most people, because he has been on the committee for one of them for nineteen years and he was on the committee for the other one for six years in his twenties, before he married and moved to the other end of the road.

Nobody has ever remarked on this. Not once, in either building.

He is fifty-four.

There are perhaps four other people in that town in the same position, and he knows all four, and it has never come up with any of them either, not even at a funeral, not even after a drink.

Both anniversaries are lovely. That is what he wants said before anything else.

There is food and a display of photographs and somebody reads out a list of the ones who have gone, and the second Sunday is the same in both places, and both of them do it well and both of them mean it.

The photographs overlap. He has seen the same wedding on two different display boards, in two different halls, eleven days apart, in the same October.

Nobody in either hall said a word about it.

He did not either.

And in July, sorting through a box for this year's display, he found a photograph of a picnic that has both congregations in it, before, and he stood in a store cupboard holding it and did not know which board it belonged on.

He put it back in the box.

And the sentence that has been in him since, which he has said to nobody, including his wife, is: I have spent thirty years being warm in two rooms and honest in neither.

And you may have been in both rooms. Or you may know exactly who has, and have never said that either.

Joel has God speaking about the years that were eaten

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it thirty years and it was never yours to carry alone.

You are not a hypocrite for being warm in two rooms. You never were, and warmth in a room is not the same as agreement with a silence. Scripture has God speaking about a stretch of years that got eaten and saying what He intends to do about them, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a well-run October, who restores anything. Set it down here at this table. It is heavy and it has been in a store cupboard since July.

Now hear it, and hear who is speaking and what He calls the years.

I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten.Joel 2:25

The years the locusts have eaten.

He names them. He does not describe them as a season of adjustment or as something that simply happened. Something ate them and He says so plainly, and He is the one saying it, which means the plain naming is not disloyalty. It is His own wording.

And then the promise is not that the years were secretly fine. It is repayment, which only makes sense if a real loss occurred and He is treating it as real.

Your thirty years are named and God is not pretending about them. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the restoring, and He has never once needed a loss called something softer first.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says either October is a sham. They are not. People work hard on those halls, the food is real, the list of names read out is read with love, and Scripture has no complaint at all about a people remembering their own dead.

And nothing here says one of those two committees is the guilty one. It does not, and you have sat on both and you know perfectly well that neither room contains a villain, and I will not invent one to make this page sharper.

The point is only about the two boards and the same wedding, and Scripture has God naming eaten years without softening them, and His Spirit is the one who does the repaying.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. You put the picnic photograph back in the box.

Not out of cowardice. You put it back because there is genuinely no board it belongs on, and that is the truest thing in this whole article, and it is not your fault that it is true. His Spirit was in that store cupboard and He has never once thought less of a man standing there holding it.