The Glove on the Top Shelf

He is up on the second step of the stool in the garage looking for the extension cord, which is not where it should be, because nothing in a garage is ever where it should be.

Saturday, late morning, the big door up. Warm concrete. Somebody two yards over is running a mower and the smell of it is coming in on the air along with cut grass, and the light through the open door is falling in a long bright rectangle across the floor and stopping halfway.

His hand goes past the cord and hits leather.

It is his glove. Top shelf, at the back, behind a can of something. Stiff as a board now, laces gone gray, the pocket still holding the shape of a ball that has not been in it for six years, and there is dust across the webbing thick enough to leave a stripe on his thumb.

He comes down off the stool holding it and forgets about the cord entirely.

Because it starts right there, standing on the warm concrete with a mower going next door, and once it starts he cannot stop it. Six years. He has spent six years counting one thing, the thing itself, the thing everybody asks about when they ask how he is. And now he is standing there counting the rest.

The job. He did not lose it, exactly. He let it go, quietly, in a phone call he made himself so that nobody would have to make it for him, and he told everybody it was the right time.

The rhythm. He used to get up before the house did. He does not remember when that stopped or what replaced it.

And the Saturdays. This is the one that has the glove in it. There was a version of him that came out to the grass at nine in the morning and got hollered at for throwing too hard, and the kids are older now and have their own mornings, and somewhere in the six years that man just quietly stopped coming outside, and nobody ever said anything about it, and there was never a day you could point to.

Nobody has ever asked him about any of that. Not once. Every conversation for six years has been about the thing itself, and this whole other column has been running the entire time with no name on it.

That is you, perhaps, in your own garage, with your own stiff leather in your hand. You have been counting one thing out loud and a whole list of other things in silence. Nobody asks about the second list. And you have half concluded that it does not count as loss, because it is not the loss, and therefore there is nowhere to put it.

God counts damage by name

Here is the first thing, and it is smaller than it sounds and it will hold weight.

The second list is real loss. It is not a mood, it is not self pity, and it is not you being ungrateful for what you still have. Things were taken. Not by anybody's malice, most likely, and not all at once, but taken, and the fact that nobody sent a card about them does not make them smaller. They only went unnamed because the first list was so loud that nobody had a hand free.

And God, it turns out, is an itemizer.

And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.Joel 2:25

Four names in one sentence. Now, scholars will tell you those are four stages or four kinds of the same devouring insect, and that is exactly the point I want you to see. God does not say the bugs took some stuff. He walks through the damage naming the thing that did each part of it, one at a time, like a man going down a field with a notebook.

And then look at what He says He restores. Not the crop. The years. He could have said the harvest, the grain, the vines, the numbers. He says the years the locust hath eaten, which means the thing being counted here is not produce at all. It is time. It is what a life was doing in that stretch, and who somebody was during it, and He puts a value on that and speaks about handing it back.

One honest note, because I will not use a verse by pretending half of it away. Joel is speaking to a nation under a specific covenant arrangement it had been warned about for centuries, and that last clause about the army He sent belongs to that conversation and to that people. I am not putting it on your body and neither is God. What crosses over to you is the character of the One speaking: this is how He looks at damage, and this is what He counts, and this is what He talks about restoring.

You have losses that God counts by name, and He has never once lumped yours together. Joel 2:25 itemizes four devourers in a single line, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an agricultural sentence from a farming nation and lays it across a man holding a stiff glove on a Saturday.

Additional, and not instead

Now I have to be very careful, because this is the exact place where pages like this one go wrong, and the way they go wrong is cruel.

Here is the wrong version. A person asks God about their body for six years. The body is not what they hoped. So somewhere near the end of the article the writer gets warm and says: but look what God has done in you, look how you have grown, and is that not the real healing after all. And the person closes the tab having been handed a substitute they never asked for, dressed up as the thing they did ask for, and told to be grateful.

That is not what is happening on this page. Say it with me plainly: this is additional. What God does in the person is in addition to what He does in the body, and it is never a swap, never a consolation prize, and never a reason to stop asking about the thing itself. If you were asking Him about your body this morning, keep asking about your body this afternoon. Nothing in this article closes that file, and nothing in it downgrades your request to something more spiritual and easier to grant.

What I am saying is only this: the second column exists, and it has never been off His books.

You are a whole person to Him, and never a body with a problem attached to it. It is written that He restores years and not merely harvests, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that restoring in the parts of a man nobody has asked about in six years.

And one thing that belongs in the open, because I would rather say it plainly. If the counting has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if standing in the garage today put a thought in you about not being here for the next six, tell a human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who will sit with you tonight. A page cannot come and stand on the concrete with you. You deserve somebody who can.