The Slow Lane

The lane rope on her left is blue and white and it hums when the aqua aerobics class starts up two lanes over, and she counts her strokes to it, because counting is what her body still knows how to do in a pool.

Slow lane. She chose it. The retired men do their steady breaststroke in it with their heads up like herons, and a woman with a float kicks up and down the far side, and nobody in it is racing anybody, which is the point. At nineteen she swam for the county. There was a board in a recreation center thirty miles from here with her name on it in gold letters for the two hundred, and it stayed there for six years, and then somebody faster came, which is how boards work.

She does not mind about the board. She minds about the years. Between the board and the slow lane there was an illness, and the illness took her thirties, all of them, cleanly, the way a tide takes a sandcastle you spent the whole afternoon on. She is forty-one and she has been well for eighteen months, and every week somebody kind says the sentence. In the changing room, in the parking lot, on the phone: God is going to give you those years back. You watch. He restores.

She loves them for saying it. She also knows, in the part of herself that counts strokes, that it is not how this works. The years are not coming back. The shoulders are not coming back. The two hundred is on no board anywhere. And she cannot say that to the kind people, because it sounds like unbelief, and it is not unbelief. It is arithmetic. So she swims the slow lane and counts to the hum of the rope and says nothing.

You know that lane. You have your own version of the sentence, said by people who love you and mean it, and you have your own arithmetic that will not let you nod along. And I am not going to make you choose between the two, because you do not have to. Restored is not the same word as replaced. It never was. Hold that, because it is the whole of what follows, and it is honest.

You are being restored by a God who put that word into a book about a woman who lost everything and never got any of it back. Ruth 4:15 calls the child a restorer of life and a nourisher of old age, which is written about a person and not about a return, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that land on somebody in a slow lane with a stopwatch running in her memory.

Restored is not replaced, and the Book knows the difference

Let me say the honest thing first, plainly, so nothing that comes after can be mistaken for softening it. Some things do not come back. Not because God is unable, and not because you failed to believe hard enough; nobody here is going to lay that on you. They do not come back because time only runs one way, and God, who could run it the other way, mostly does not, and He has never once pretended otherwise in His own book.

He shall be to you a restorer of life and a nourisher of your old age.Ruth 4:15

Look at who that is said to. Naomi. A woman who went out full and came back empty, in her own words, who lost a husband and two sons in a foreign country and told the women of her town to stop calling her Pleasant and start calling her Bitter. Nobody corrected her. And at the end of the book, with a child on her lap and a daughter-in-law beside her, the women say this: He shall be to you a restorer of life.

Notice what did not happen. Her sons did not come back. Their graves stayed in Moab. Her husband did not walk in the door. What she was handed was not a copy of what she lost; it was life, restored, in a shape she had not ordered and could not have drawn. That is what the word means when God uses it. Not the years handed back in a box. The person handed back to life.

You are being restored as a person, and nobody is asking you to pretend the years are the same. I am not softening this for you. It is written, He is a restorer of life, and it was written about a woman whose loss stayed lost, and it is His Spirit who is doing the restoring in you now, in the slow lane, at forty-one, in a body that counts strokes. The times are not the subject. You are.

The kind people are not wrong about God

Now let me say the second thing, because the woman in the lane needs it as much as the first. The people who say the sentence are not fools and they are not liars. They are reaching for a true thing about God, that He restores, and they are reaching for it with the only picture they have, which is the thing being handed back. Do not mock them, and do not let this article mock them. Their instinct is right. Their picture is too small.

Peter, writing to people who had lost a great deal, says that after they have suffered a little while, the God of all grace will Himself restore, confirm, strengthen and establish them. Restore is the first verb. And it sits beside three others that are all about the person: made firm, made strong, set on a footing. None of the four is about getting the thing back. All four are about the one who lost it being made whole enough to stand.

You have a God who restores you, and He does not hand you a copy, and the difference is the whole mercy. Scripture puts restore beside strengthen and establish on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing all four in a person, slowly and truly, while the well-meant sentence keeps pointing at the box. What is happening in you is real. And it is not the same. Both of those are true at once, and you are allowed to say both.