You Don't Get the Years Back

There are photographs of me at things I don't remember.

Birthdays. Ordinary Saturdays. A story gets told at a table somewhere about a day I was in the room for, and there is even a photo of it, and I'm standing right there. Present and accounted for. And I have nothing. No memory of the day at all. The bourbon and the anger didn't just take those evenings from my family. They took the evenings from me too, and they didn't leave receipts.

That's the grief of this chapter, and I'm not going to soften it, because you've trusted me this far and you'd smell the lie. The thing I grieve most from the old life is easy to name: lost time with my family. Things I missed out on that I can never get back. Never. My daughters were little exactly once. There is no version of the rebuilt life where God hands me back a bedtime from a year I spent in a glass. Anybody who tells you otherwise, any preacher who promises the rewind, is selling you something, and you already know how I feel about being sold to.

So this last chapter of Part One is about the question every rebuilt man eventually has to answer: what do you do with grief over things that cannot be fixed?

Because there are two ways to carry it, and one of them almost killed me.

Paul draws the line with surgical precision: "For the sorrow that is according to the will of God produces a repentance without regret, leading to salvation, but the sorrow of the world produces death" (2 Corinthians 7:10, NASB 1995). Two sorrows. They start in the same place, the same photo, the same "remember when," and they run to opposite ends of the earth. One sorrow turns you toward God and walks you into change. The other turns you inward and grinds you into the ground. I have carried both, and I can tell you exactly what each one smells like. The sorrow of the world was the crushing guilt I told you about, the kind I used to pour bourbon on, the kind that whispers you are what you did and calls the whispering honesty. That sorrow produces death. It nearly produced mine. Godly sorrow is different. It hurts just as much, sometimes more, because it doesn't numb itself. But it moves. It gets up. It produces a repentance you never end up regretting, because it leads somewhere.

Now here's my confession about those two sorrows: in the moment, I can't always tell them apart. The wave comes at the dinner table, off a photo, out of a story, and I don't know in that first second whether it's godly regret or the old shame circling back for another try.

So I stopped sorting first. When it hits, I don't allow the shame to take hold, and I don't stand there diagnosing which sorrow it is. I start praying. No matter which one it is, I don't wait. I just pray.

I want you to see how much that one habit carries. Shame does its work in the dark, alone, in the space between you and the memory. Prayer drags the memory into company it can't survive. If it was godly sorrow, God takes it and turns it into fuel. If it was shame, it dies on His doorstep, because shame cannot stand in front of the God who already answered, at the cross, for the thing it keeps bringing up. Either way, the wave breaks. I have never once regretted praying fast, and I have decades of proof of what happens when a man lets the wave take him instead.

And here's what I've learned about what God does with years He does not give back.

He doesn't rewind them. He repurposes them. There's a promise God made to Israel after locusts God Himself had sent had stripped their fields down to the dirt, whole seasons devoured, and after the people finally turned back: "Then I will make up to you for the years That the swarming locust has eaten" (Joel 2:25, NASB 1995). Not "I will return the years." Make up to you. Different thing entirely, and honest men need the difference. The harvests that got eaten stayed eaten. What God promised was that the seasons still coming would carry more than they had any natural right to carry. That promise belonged to Israel, but the God who made it hasn't changed, and in Christ I've watched Him do the same arithmetic in my house: the years the locusts ate are gone, and the years since the rescue have carried more life, more laughter, more of God, than all the eaten ones combined.

But He did one thing with my lost years I never saw coming. He put them to work.

God has shown me that even though those years were bad, something good can come out of them. Not good in themselves, they weren't, but usable. He means them to be used, that's how I've come to see it, used to teach other men to be stronger, better fathers, better husbands. He keeps pushing me to tell my story to more men, and every time I do, somebody's carrying the same weight I carried. This book in your hands is my lost years, working. The memory I don't have of a birthday is buying some other man a birthday he gets to keep. I don't pretend to understand that trade. God has a plan. I have no idea what it is. But I've learned to keep listening to Him anyway, because He works it out, even out of the wreck, and He keeps proving it.

Now, a word for the man doing the math. Maybe you're forty and you've burned fifteen years. Maybe you're sixty and it's most of the ledger. You're reading this thinking, good for him, he got out young. Brother, put the calculator down. It is never too late to give it all to God and let Him change you. Never. Anyone who thinks different is lying to himself, and the loudest voice telling you it's too late is coming from the same darkness that ate the years in the first place. It stole your past. Don't hand it your future out of grief for what it already took. Your time is right now, today, to start living the life God intended you to have. The years left in your hands are the only ones you've ever had. They are enough, because He is.

So here's the last work of Part One, and then we turn a corner together.

First, install the protocol. This week, when the wave comes, the photo, the memory, the "remember when" you can't join, don't sort it, don't fight it, don't pour anything on it. Pray. Immediately, mid-wave, five words: "Lord, take this. Use it." You don't have to know which sorrow it is. He does.

Second, put one lost year to work. Tell one man one piece of your story this week, a piece that cost you something. The moment your worst season leaves your mouth in the service of another man, it stops being only a loss. That's not you fixing the past. That's God repurposing it, and He's been waiting for you to hand it over.

Which brings me to the last thing I want to say to you before we start talking about your wife, and I want it to be the sentence you carry out of Part One.

Giving it to God isn't weakness. He always intended you to give it to Him. Every weight you've met in these chapters, the mask, the anger, the bottle, the night, the guilt, the lost years, all of it was always meant for His hands, not yours. And the sooner you give it, the sooner you start walking toward the thing I found, the thing this whole book is written to hand you: freedom from the darkness.

The man underneath has been to the bottom, met God there, and come back up. That's Part One. Now let's talk about the woman who watched the whole thing and stayed.

Turn the page. It's time to become her husband.