Three Years and a Decade

Your daughter asked you to drive her to something on Saturday and you said yes, and then you sat in the kitchen afterwards for about ten minutes doing something that was not thinking.

Three years.

She was eleven when it started and she is twenty-two now, and there is a stretch in the middle of that which you have in fragments and she has in full.

Your family have forgiven you. That is not in question and it has not been in question for a while. Your wife said it plainly in the second year in a way that did not leave room for argument. Your son is easier with you than he has been since he was small.

Everybody says how far you have come. They say it warmly and they mean it and you say thank you, and every single time there is a fraction of a second where something in you does not accept it.

Because you were there for the decade. You are the only person in this house who has the full account of it, and you cannot get the account and the forgiveness to sit in the same place.

Saturday. Driving your daughter somewhere, which is the most ordinary thing a father does, and it took you ten minutes at the table to put down what it brought up.

The psalm measures the distance itself

There is a passage in Psalm 103 that does something very specific with geography.

He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us.Psalm 103:10-12

Read the measurement. Not north from south, which is a fixed distance with two poles at the ends of it. East from west, which has no meeting point and no limit, because you can travel east for ever and never arrive at west.

The psalmist chose the one measurement that does not terminate.

And note the verb. Hath removed. Past tense, completed, done by God, with nobody assisting.

You are standing on the far side of a distance God measured Himself. I am not putting my own idea over you here. Scripture says as far as the east is from the west, so far hath He removed our transgressions from us, Psalm 103:12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that into a kitchen where a man has just been asked to drive somebody somewhere.

The decade was real and this is not a minimizing

I am not going to tell you the ten years were smaller than they were.

They were not. There are things in that decade that mattered and that cost other people, and pretending otherwise would be an insult to your daughter's actual life, and you would know it while you read it.

Scripture does not minimize either. The same psalm says our transgressions, which is a real word for a real thing, and then it removes them, and it does both without softening the first half.

That is the shape of it. The wound is named and then it is carried away. Not denied, and not left in place.

You are not being asked to say it was not that bad. Scripture says He hath not dealt with us after our sins, Psalm 103:10, and the Holy Spirit does not require a man to shrink the account before He will apply the mercy to it.

Why the forgiveness will not land

Here is what is actually happening in that fraction of a second.

You are carrying a ledger that everybody else has closed. Your wife closed hers. Your son closed his. God, according to the verse, closed His before any of them. Scripture settles that in Psalm 103:10-12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

And you are still holding yours open, because you were there, and because putting it down feels like getting away with something.

That instinct is not humility, and Scripture assigns the removing to God alone, Psalm 103:12, and the Holy Spirit did not ask for a second opinion. It looks like humility, and it is doing exactly the opposite job. What it is actually saying is that your accounting is more accurate than God's, and that His east-from-west is a generous approximation and yours is the real figure.

You are not more thorough than God about your own decade. Scripture says as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward them that fear Him, Psalm 103:11, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to audit that.

Nobody else gets to say it was worth it either

And the other half, which is the reason those words land oddly.

People say how far you have come, and it is true, and it also quietly implies a sum: ten years in one column, three in the other, everything is fine now. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Psalm 103:10-12, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

That is not what happened. Three good years do not reimburse a decade. They are not the same currency and they never were in one ledger, and you are not obliged to accept an arithmetic that nobody has actually worked out.

You are also not obliged to correct anybody. You can say thank you and let it go past, because Scripture keeps gift and endurance in separate hands, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit has never once presented a man with an invoice.

You are not being paid out, you are being given something. Scripture says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a man three years back as a receipt for ten.