Empty years
March 14, 2013
image courtesy of photobucket.com
You reach a point when there’s enough behind you that it warrants a looking back. I’ve caught myself doing a little of that this past year. I’m forty now. That’s the sort of age that lends itself to a certain amount of introspection. I figure if all goes well, I’m somewhere close to the fifty-yard line of my life. It’s important to know from where I’ve come and to where I’m going.
The problem with looking over my shoulder is what’s staring back at me. If I’m honest, I’ll say I should be a little farther along than I am. I couldn’t imagine forty when I was eighteen. It was an age I painted in broad strokes and mixed colors. And yet even with that in mind, I’ve fallen short.
It’s all that empty space, you see. Giant chunks of years I spent doing large amounts of nothing. My past seems a waste for the most part, a long string of failures best defined by equal amounts confusion and ignorance.
I worked down at the town gas station for ten years after I graduated.
Spent five more at the factory.
I’m on year six of an occupation that offers little in things like pay and advancement, but those shortcomings are more than made up for in stress and labor.
That’s twenty-one years all together. No wonder I walk around feeling like I’m playing catch-up.
I’m not alone in all this. I know plenty of other people who feel much the same way. We work hard and save what we can and still feel like a gerbil on one of those wheels that spin and spin and never go anywhere. Makes you wonder what it’s all about.
I was talking all of this over with a preacher friend of mine the other day. Smart guy, as most of them are. He’s older, which meant he knew exactly where I was coming from. And when I was done talking, this is what he said:
Jesus didn’t do much of anything for about twenty years. It doesn’t really feel right, saying that. I don’t mean to imply the Lord was lazy in any way. Bu the preacher supposed that if Christ had done anything worth mentioning between the time he left his momma and daddy to head home from Jerusalem without him and the time he called his disciples, someone would’ve said something. But the Good Book is silent on such things. No one knows what exactly Jesus was doing all those years.
That’s why you’ll find all those legends and lost gospels saying how he went to Egypt or India, or how he liked to make living sparrows out of mud. And while I can understand the allure of such things, the preacher thought it better that the Lord simply lived a quiet life back then. He rose up every morning and went to work. Helped his daddy build a door or a chair, maybe, or did his part with the household chores. He went home at the end of the day and broke bread and talked and laughed, and then he went to bed knowing the next day only promised more of the same.
But the preacher also told me all those empty years weren’t for nothing. Sure, the three or four years after were more exciting. Those were the ones filled with miracles and intrigue and a rising from the grave. But none of those things could have happened were it not for those quiet years before. That was the preparation. The getting ready.
I like that.
That’s why I’m going to try and reconsider my own missing years. I’m going to try and look upon them in a new way. Because really, is there anything quiet when it comes to God? Any moment without purpose? Anything in even the smallest life that could be considered as lost or missing?
I think not.
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5 Responses to “Empty years”
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I’m a writer of two novels, Snow Day (2010) and Paper Angels (2011), with two more on the way by Thomas Nelson. That may make me sound smart and/or wise. Neither is particularly applicable. I count that as a blessing, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is you never know what you might run into..
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This is wonderfully put. As a mother of three young ones, I often feel like I’m missing out on so much because I spend my days playing Legoes and changing diapers. Thanks for the reminder that nothing is quiet or empty when it comes to God.
I am a bit older than you, and at times I come up empty. I have been writing a blog for two years,and gathered enough stories to self print my own book about my early childhood, but the blogger friends who have been supporters and ordered my book were few (two). And although I leave comments on many different blogger posts each time I read them, many have never written a comment on my post. Perhaps I am looking over my shoulder too much, and wonder if all this writing is reaching anyone at all.
I also wonder if my comments mean anything to those I leave them with.
In your “missing years,” you actually received a lot of information and background for your writing and for your books.
Thanks for sharing this. I’m also facing 40 in about a month and I’m trying not to be too hard on myself. The problem is dealing with the dashed expectations. But how can you imagine how your life s going to be if you haven’t yet lived it? We all have to ease up a little on ourselves.
Take care,
Jennifer
Moses wandered and consumed 40 years BEFORE God even spoke to him in a burning bush.
You are in good company.
Look for the God in the burning bush, the gentle whisper, a needy person in your path.
God will find you.
He is outside of time…..unlike the finite, mortal us.