Sixty-Two and Starting

There is a gravel pull-off about two miles up the ridge road, and he parks there. Not every day. Enough days.

From the cab you can see the whole face of the ridge and, about halfway up where the road bends, the old two room schoolhouse with the tin roof and the bell frame with no bell in it. It has been shut since before his daughter was born. There is grass through the steps and the windows are boarded with plywood that has gone silver, and every time he drives past he slows down without deciding to.

He is sixty-two. He turns the engine off and sits there with his arm on the wheel.

At forty he was going to start his own outfit. He had the trailer half paid for. Then his wife got sick, and eleven years went into that, the good ones and the terrible ones and the long flat middle where you are just a person who drives to appointments. Then six more with his mother, which he would do again and does not regret and which still took six years. And then a stretch where he was fifty-nine and tired all the way through, and getting up was the achievement.

Twenty-two years. He did not sign up for them. They were not a decision he made; they were a thing that happened to his family and he stood in it, which is what a man does, and the standing cost him every year he had counted on using for something else.

Here is the thing he has never said out loud, to his daughter, to the men at church, to anybody. He thinks that schoolhouse ought to be a shop. Two rooms, one for wiring and one for welding, and the boys in this valley who are not going to college and are not going anywhere else either could learn a trade in it from the men who already know one, of which there are eleven within four miles and he could name all of them right now.

He has had that thought for two years. It comes up every time he parks there and he puts it back down every time, and here is exactly how he puts it down. He says to himself: at sixty-two. And that is the whole argument and it wins every time, because the years he would have needed to build a thing like that are the twenty-two years that got spent on hospitals.

So he sits, and he looks at a silver plywood window, and then he starts the truck and goes home.

You have a ridge of your own and something on it that you have never said out loud. It may be a shop, or a class, or a house you were going to open to somebody, or a piece of work you know needs doing that nobody else is going to do. And you have the same argument, and yours also wins every time, and it sounds like a fact rather than an argument because it comes with a number attached. You are looking at something real, and the years that were taken from you did not cancel it. Joshua 14:12 is a written verse spoken by a man who lost forty years to other people's unbelief and it does not have a syllable of apology in it, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in that truck cab with you every time you slowed down without deciding to.

An old man asking for the worst ground on the map

Here is what he says. Read it as a man talking, because that is what it is.

Now therefore give me this mountain, whereof the LORD spake in that day; for thou heardest in that day how the Anakims were there, and that the cities were great and fenced: if so be the LORD will be with me, then I shall be able to drive them out, as the LORD said.Joshua 14:12

Caleb is eighty-five years old when he says that, and you have to know how he got there or the sentence is just a nice line about spunk.

Forty-five years earlier he went into that land as one of twelve scouts. He came back and told the truth. So did one other man. The other ten came back and told the people the land would eat them, and the people believed the ten, and the whole nation turned around and walked into the wilderness for forty years over a report Caleb did not give and did not agree with and could not undo.

He lost forty years to other men's unbelief. He was not being disciplined. He was standing in the middle of somebody else's decision and paying for it, which is the single most common thing that happens on this side of restoration and the thing this whole site was built for.

You have a man in Joshua 14:12 who lost four decades to other people and then asked for the hardest ground on the map. That is written down, in those words, with the giants and the fenced cities named out loud in the request itself, and it is the same Spirit who kept a man's heart whole through forty years of walking a desert he never voted for who is at work in you on a gravel pull-off.

And do not miss the middle of the verse. If so be the LORD will be with me. Caleb builds the condition into his own ask. He is not announcing an outcome and he is not telling God the schedule. He is asking for the assignment and leaving the result where it belongs, and there is more faith in that clause than in a hundred guarantees.

Restored into something, not only out of something

Now, the honest part, because I am not going to sell you a hill country.

Caleb did not get the forty years back. He was eighty-five when he asked, not forty-five, and no page of that book says otherwise. The wandering happened. The people who died out there stayed dead. Restored is not the same word as replaced, and God did not hand Caleb a rewound calendar; He handed him a piece of ground and a next thing to do with the life he still had.

That is the difference this whole category turns on. Most people thinking about restoration are thinking about being restored out of something. Out of the wilderness, out of the hospital years, out of the flat stretch where getting up was the achievement. That is real and it matters. But there is a second half nobody expects: God restores a person into something. Into a place, a work, a use. Not as a reward for the wandering. Because He is not finished with people and never has been.

You are being restored into something and not only out of something. His word puts a mountain in front of an old man rather than a rocking chair, and it says the Lord had spoken about that ground long before, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the restoring in a person, on ground and in seasons a person would not have picked.

And here is where I have to slow down and be careful, because this category can be used to hurt somebody and I will not do it. Caleb says he is as strong that day as he was the day Moses sent him. Some of you cannot say that sentence. Your body is not what it was, and it is not coming back to what it was, and no amount of getting after it is going to settle that. So hear this plainly: what he took the mountain with is not the point of the story, and usefulness is not the proof that God has restored you. You were restored by what God did and not by what your hands can still lift. It is written that God works in the inward person day by day whatever the outward one is doing, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work in a body that is failing exactly as thoroughly as in one that is not.