The Years Were Added, Not Taken

There is a word that has been sitting under every thought you have had about this and I do not think you have ever seen it.

The word is losing.

Losing my looks. Losing it. Losing something. It is such an ordinary way of speaking that nobody hears it any more, and every single instance of it carries an assumption about direction that nobody has ever been asked to defend.

The assumption is that time subtracts.

Notice how completely that has been built into the language. There is no ordinary phrase for the opposite. Nobody says gaining my years the way people say losing my looks, and a language that has one word and not the other will do most of your thinking for you before you get anywhere near a mirror.

I am a careful man about words and I want to spend this piece on that one, because I believe the whole difficulty sits inside it.

Which way the arithmetic runs

Consider what actually happens in a year.

Something is added. Twelve months of events, of things learned, of people met, of things survived. That is the plain fact of it. A year deposits.

And something changes. A body is different at the end of a year than at the start of it, and some of that change is visible on a face.

Now, both of those are true, and only one of them gets counted.

You could not tell me what the last twelve months deposited without a considerable effort. You could tell me in four seconds what they changed on your face. And you have called the second one the year's result, and filed the first one nowhere at all.

You are keeping one column of a ledger that has two, and the deposits have never once been entered. The Holy Spirit is what shows a woman a filing decision she never made consciously, and Proverbs 9 says which direction days and years run when wisdom is speaking.

And I want to press on the word losing once more, because it has a specific technical meaning and it does not apply here.

You lose a thing that was yours and is now gone and is somewhere else. A key. A ring. Money.

Nothing about a face at fifty is somewhere else. Nothing left. Nothing was taken by anybody. What happened is that a body continued, which is what a living body does, and the word losing was applied to a process that has no loser and no thief in it anywhere.

You are using a word for theft where nothing has ever once been taken from you, and no year has ever been able to remove a thing and put it elsewhere. Scripture in Proverbs 9 speaks of days being multiplied and years increased, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a wrong word out of a woman's mouth.

The years of thy life shall be increased

There is a line in the ninth chapter of Proverbs where wisdom is speaking, and it uses two words about time that run the other way.

For by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years of thy life shall be increased. (Proverbs 9:11, King James Version)

Multiplied. Increased.

Both are arithmetic words and both run upward. That is not incidental language. It is the way the whole book of Proverbs speaks about a life that is being lived well, and it never once reverses.

Now, I am careful with this verse and I want to say why. It is not a promise of a long life to any individual, and I am not going to preach it as one. It is wisdom describing what she gives to a person who takes her.

But look at the direction, which is the thing I want you to have.

You are described by a text whose arithmetic has never once run downward, and no verse anywhere subtracts a year from a person. It is written in Proverbs 9 that thy days shall be multiplied and the years of thy life shall be increased, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman hear a direction she has not heard before.

And there is something worth noticing about how the word increased is used.

The years of thy life shall be increased. Not the number of years. The years themselves. In Hebrew thought a year is a container, and a full year is one with something in it, and increase can mean weight rather than count.

That is exactly what the second column of your ledger holds. Weight. Years that have things in them.

You are holding years with weight in them, and nobody has ever once weighed the ones you have already had. The Spirit of God is what shifts a woman's attention from counting years to weighing them, and the written word says the years of thy life shall be increased.

Five years, five things

So here is the assignment, and it is arithmetic done properly for once.

Sit for ten minutes tonight and name one thing each of the last five years gave you.

One per year. Five in total. Out loud or on paper, whichever.

And keep it small. This is not a review of your achievements. It is: what did that year put in. Something learned, something survived, somebody who came into your life, a thing that stopped being frightening, care that somebody gave you or that you gave somebody.

You are adding up what a year deposited rather than what it removed, and no year has ever once come and gone leaving nothing behind it. Proverbs 9 says by me thy days shall be multiplied, and the years of thy life shall be increased, and the Holy Spirit is what shows a woman the addition she has been reading as a subtraction.

2021 gave me the knowledge that I can be alone in a house. 2022 gave me my son back. 2023 gave me the certainty that I will not do that job again. That kind of thing.

It will be hard for two of them. That is normal and it does not mean those years were empty. It means those years have never been asked.

You are able to weigh five years that have only ever been counted, and it has never once been the case that they were empty, only that they were unexamined. The written word in Proverbs 9 says thy days shall be multiplied, and the Holy Spirit is what turns ten minutes of remembering into care rather than into a review.