The Boxes Never Got Unpacked

There were eleven boxes and they went in the garage in October, and it was going to be a weekend job.

You remember the weekend. It got taken by the water heater, and then by a birthday, and then by the fact that everything in the house that mattered was already unpacked, and the boxes in the garage held nothing anybody needed on a Tuesday.

That was three years ago.

They are still there, against the back wall, behind the folding chairs. One of them has a corner gone soft from something that dripped. You know which one it is.

And in three years you have read nothing. Not one book, front to back, since the day the tape went on.

Nobody decided that. There is no evening you can point at where a man sat down and concluded he was finished with reading. It happened by omission, over about ninety days, and then it was just how things were.

I want to name two things you will not find here, because you have run into both.

Nobody is handing you a list. No titles, no authors, no genre, no shelf of what a man ought to have got through by now. Being handed one has never once opened a box, and mostly it just adds a book to the stack of things a person is behind on.

And nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows. Hearing it again from a stranger does not put a single book back in your hands.

What I want to look at is the boxes, because I think the boxes are the whole thing, and not in the way you would expect.

The books did not go into storage. Reading did.

Restore the years that the locust hath eaten

There is a promise in Joel 2 that gets quoted a lot and almost always about money or years of wandering. It is worth reading it exactly as it stands.

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, King James Version)

Look at what is being restored. Not the crops. The years.

That distinction matters. A crop is a thing you lost. A year is a stretch of a life in which a man was somebody, and the locust did not eat a harvest here, it ate the seasons in which the harvest would have happened.

And notice what the locust was. My great army which I sent among you. Joel is not describing a random misfortune. He is describing something that came through and took years, and then he has God announcing that the years themselves come back.

You have years coming back rather than a project owing, and eleven taped boxes have never once been a sentence passed on a reader. The Holy Spirit is the one out in that garage with you, and Joel 2:25 restores the years and asks the man in the field for no account of how they went.

Now look at the mechanism, because this is the part that fits a garage.

Nothing in Joel 2:25 says the fields get rebuilt first. The restoration is not a project with a schedule attached. It is announced, flatly, over people standing in a field that still looks stripped.

You are not a man who stopped reading, and three years behind the folding chairs has never once ended who you were. Joel 2:25 hands back the years and not merely the harvest that grew in them, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the handing back over a garage in the dark.

There is one more thing in that verse that a man in your position needs.

It does not ask what happened. There is no accounting demanded, no explanation required, no confession about the weekend that got taken by a water heater. The locust came through and the years get restored, and the reason those years went missing is never once litigated.

You have years coming back that nobody is going to ask you to account for, and three lost years have never once needed an explanation from you first. It is written that He restores the years the locust ate, the verse asks nothing of the man standing in the field, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly over a garage in October's leftovers.

Reading went into storage, not the books

Here is the mechanism, and once you see it the assignment is obvious.

Reading was not an activity for you. It was a location.

It happened in a specific chair, in a specific room, with a specific lamp and a shelf within reach, and the shelf was part of the machinery. You browsed. You picked something up because it was at eye level, put it back, took another. That is how a reader finds the next book, and it never once involved a decision that got written down.

Then the move happened, and the shelf did not go back up, because the wall it went on in the old place does not exist in this one.

So the browsing stopped. And when the browsing stopped, the choosing stopped, and when the choosing stopped there was nothing to read, and a man with nothing to read is not a man who quit reading. He is a man whose supply line got taped shut and put behind some chairs.

That is why willpower has not touched this in three years. There is nothing to apply willpower to. You cannot decide harder to read a book you cannot see.

You are not short on discipline, and three years of nothing has never once been about wanting it less. Joel 2:25 restores the years and not the effort, and the Holy Spirit is present with a man who lost a shelf and not a love.

And there is a second thing, quieter, and it is the reason the garage stays shut.

Eleven boxes is a project. Going out there means an hour, a decision about where things go, a wall that needs a bracket, a trip to the hardware store on Saturday. So the whole of reading now sits behind a home improvement job, and home improvement jobs in a working life go to the back of a very long line.

You have a way in that is not a project, and getting a book has never once required a wall and a bracket first. The written word restores years to men standing in a field nobody has replanted, and His Spirit is the one who opens a thing that has been taped shut.

One book off the top of one box

So here is the assignment, and the size of it is deliberate.

Go out to the garage tonight, take one book off the top of one box, and read one page of it.

Not unpack a box. Not find the right box. Not look for the one left halfway through in October, which is probably in the soft cornered one and is not worth an hour on a Tuesday.

Walk out. Open whatever box is easiest. Take the top book. Come back in. Read one page.

Here is why that shape matters.

The project has been the obstacle for three years, so the assignment cannot contain a project. There is no sorting in this, no shelf, no decision about the wall. One box, opened badly, one book off the top, and you do not even have to like it.

And one page, because ten would turn into an assessment of whether you have the evening, and you have had that assessment three hundred times and you know how it goes.

You are able to walk out to a garage and come back with one book, and one page has never once needed a shelf and a lamp to count. Joel 2:25 restores years to a man who has not touched the field yet, and the Holy Ghost is the one out there with you when the door goes up.

You are going to feel silly standing in a garage in your socks at nine at night. Let it be silly. Silly things that take four minutes are how three year old decisions get undone, and a dignified plan for Saturday is what has been running this since October.

You have a supply line reopening tonight, and one badly opened box has never once been a worse start than a perfect Saturday. It is written that He restores the years the locust has eaten, He announces it over ground nobody has cleared, and the Spirit of God is doing that here.