The Sideline and the Missing Years

The dads are talking about grounds. Which one their own father first took them to, what the pies were like, who was playing, the smell of it. Somebody's dad had a season ticket. Somebody's dad lifted him over the turnstile. It is Sunday morning, under-nines, wet grass, orange segments in a bag, and the talk goes along the sideline the way it does, warm and easy, every man reaching back forty years for the same kind of memory.

He laughs where you laugh. He nods. His boy is out there in a shirt two sizes too big, chasing everything, and he is proud enough to burst. And when the talk comes round to him he says something about the weather, because he does not have a ground.

He does not have a father who took him anywhere. He was moved eleven times between the ages of four and sixteen. Eleven houses, eleven sets of rules, three schools he can name and two he cannot. He has done the work. He has sat in the rooms and said the words. He is a good dad; everyone says so and it is true. But standing on that sideline with the orange segments, listening to men reach back for a boyhood, he knows what he has known for a long time and does not say out loud: some of this is simply gone. There is no version of the future where he gets to be nine years old and lifted over a turnstile. No amount of anything changes that. It is not coming back because it never came.

His boy scores, or nearly. He shouts. He means it. And he stands there whole in one way and not in another, and both are true.

You know that sideline. Your permanent thing has a different shape, but you know exactly what it is, and you know it is not coming back, and you have grown tired of people who talk as if it might. What you want to know is whether God has anything to say to a person standing where you are standing, with the loss just as permanent when they finish speaking as when they started.

You are being spoken to by name, standing exactly where you are standing. 1 Peter 5:10 was written to people whose situation had not changed, and it names four things done to the person and not one done to the circumstance, and it is the Holy Spirit who says it to a man on a sideline with no boyhood to trade.

Restored is not replaced

I have to say the honest thing first, and I will say it plainly, because if I do not you will not trust anything after it.

Restored is not the same word as replaced. When Scripture says God restores, it does not mean He hands you a copy of what was taken. The boy on the sideline is not going to be given a childhood. The decade is not going to be handed back. The person who was there and is not there is not going to walk in. I have replanted a burned slope with my own hands, and I can tell you the green came back different, and the oldest tree on that hillside did not come back at all, and both of those are true and neither cancels the other.

So what does the word mean? Read what Peter writes to people who had lost a great deal, and read what the object of the verb is.

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.1 Peter 5:10

You. Not your years. Not the thing. He Himself restores you, confirms you, strengthens you, establishes you. Every verb lands on the person. There is not one word in the sentence about the return of what was taken, and that silence is not an oversight. It is the honesty of the promise. The God of all grace restores the one who lost, and He does it whether or not the thing ever comes back, and in your case it will not, and He is doing it anyway.

You are being restored right now, on the sideline, as a person, and the loss does not have to reverse for that to be true. I am not saying that over you from my own wish for you. It is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the establishing inside a man while he hands out orange segments with a boyhood missing. He does not wait for the loss to move. It is not going to. He works round it.

Naming the pit before anything else

Now the weight, all of it, because I will not put a lift over a wound that has not been named.

There is a place in you that is simply empty, and it is not empty because you failed to fill it. Something took it. A system, an illness, a person's decisions, a stretch of years you did not get a vote on. And the emptiness is not a wound that heals over; it is a room that was never built. You have made your peace with a great deal, and there is still that sideline moment when everyone reaches back and your hand closes on nothing, and it is not self pity. It is accuracy.

Scripture does not correct you for it. Peter does not say the suffering was not real, or that it was for the best, or that a little while means it will feel short. He says the God of all grace, and then he says Himself, and then he says you. He does not argue with the loss. He puts His hand on the person.

You have a God who is not waiting for the room to be built before He restores the man who lives in the house. That is His word to sufferers, and His Spirit is the one who does the strengthening in a place where nothing else has reached, and He is doing it while you read this with the permanent thing still permanent.

What is being restored, then

If not the years, what? Let me be concrete, because restoration that cannot be pointed at is only a feeling with a good name.

The man on the sideline is a father who never had one. That is restoration in the person: he was not given a childhood, and he is giving one, and the giving is real and it is his, and it did not require the receiving first. That is not a replacement for what he lost. It sits beside the loss, and the loss stays exactly its size, and the man beside it is more established than he was.

Peter's four verbs are the shape of it. Restored: put back on your feet. Confirmed: made firm where you were unsure of yourself. Strengthened: given more than you had. Established: set on ground that holds. Not one of them requires the thing to return. All four of them happen to a person who is standing in a permanent loss and being made whole beside it.

You are being made whole beside the loss, and beside is the honest word, and it is His word and not my softening of it. The Spirit of Christ is the one doing the four verbs in you, quietly, without a date, and He has not stopped because the loss is permanent. He never once made the loss the condition.