The Fence Post On The Wrong Side

The wind came through at about two and quit around four, and now it is dawn and the whole ridge is steaming. Ross is out in the low field with water over his boot tops, walking his line, and his line held. Every post. He set them himself the fall his knee was bad and he has been quietly proud of them ever since.

The line that did not hold is the one on the far side of the ditch.

Forty yards of it, flat. Posts snapped off at the ground where the water undercut them, wire down in the mud with grass already combed over it, and beyond that the low pasture standing open to the county road.

That is Clete Ballard's fence.

Ross knows the list. He could give it to you in order without stopping to think, and he has never written a word of it down, which is the thing about a list like that. Eleven years, starting with the culvert, and then the survey, and then what got said at the co op in front of eight men, and then the thing with the dog, which Ross does not talk about at all.

Behind him on the trailer, hitched since yesterday afternoon because he was going to do the corner by the creek today, there are fourteen posts, a roll of barbed wire, the driver, and the come along.

He stands in the water and looks at it.

Nobody would say a word to him. That is the part worth sitting with. If Ross climbs back in the truck right now and drives up to his own corner by the creek and spends the morning on his own fence, not one person in this county would think less of him, and several would nod. There is no rule anywhere that says a man has to put up somebody else's line. There is no debt here. There is no obligation. Clete has not called and Clete is not going to call.

The steam is coming off the grass in the first sun. The heifers are down at the far end and have not found the gap yet.

Ross has fourteen posts on the trailer and a list eleven years long, and he is standing between the two of them in six inches of water while the light comes up.

You know exactly where he is standing, because you have stood there. It was not a fence, in your case. It was a phone that rang and you looked at the name and let it go. It was a thing you had in the cupboard that would have solved somebody's whole afternoon, and you knew you had it, and you stood in the kitchen and did not go and get it. And what stopped you was not cruelty, and it was not even really anger any more. It was the list, which you have never read to anybody out loud, and every line of which you believe is accurate.

The Rain Did Not Consult The List

I want to start where Jesus started, because He said this in a sentence about weather and everybody quotes it as if it were about feelings.

That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.Matthew 5:45

Look at what that storm did last night. It did not stop at the ditch. It did not read the survey. It came down on Ross's ground and Clete's ground out of the same black sky at the same hour at the same rate, and the sun that is drying both of them this morning came up over the whole ridge at once without asking a single question about either man.

You are standing in a field that got the very same rain as his did, and neither of you ordered it. Matthew 5:45 already said He makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and the Spirit is not asking you to sort this ridge into two lists this morning.

Now here is what I am not going to do, and I want you to hear me say it plainly so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you that your list is wrong. I was not at the co op. I do not know what happened with the culvert and I have never met your neighbor. I am not going to argue that he is better than you think he is, and I am not going to agree that he is worse. That whole question is not on this page. It is not being settled here today and nobody is asking you to settle it.

You have been given something to do with your hands that does not require your mind to be finished. That is Scripture, not sentiment, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it move: God is named as kind toward the unthankful, and kindness that waits until a verdict comes in was never once His pattern.

That is the whole hinge of this message, so I am going to say it again slowly. The mercy goes out while the question stays open. Not after. While.

You were never appointed the judge of that ridge, and the relief in that is enormous. You are not taking my word for it. His word says there is one Lawgiver and Judge, and the Spirit is what carries a line like that off a page and out into a wet field at dawn where a man is standing in his own water.

You Do Not Have To Change Your Mind First

Most people who get stuck here are stuck because of an arithmetic that nobody taught them and everybody believes.

The arithmetic goes: first I have to see him differently, then I have to feel differently about him, and then, once those two are sorted, my hands are allowed to move. And since seeing him differently has not happened in eleven years, the hands have never moved, and the man has come to think of himself as somebody whose heart has gone bad.

Your heart has not gone bad. The order is simply backwards.

You are free to act long before you feel one single thing. It is written down, in Proverbs 3:27, to not withhold good from those to whom it is due when it is in the power of your hand to do it, and the same Spirit who put that line in a father's advice to his son is out on the low side of your field this morning while the steam comes off the grass.

Notice what that verse measures. Not your opinion of the man. The power of your hand. It asks one question: is it in your hand. Ross has fourteen posts on a trailer. The question has already answered itself and it never went anywhere near the culvert.

You have been carrying a list, and God has not asked you to burn it this morning. No sentence of mine could settle that ledger. Scripture does, where it says judgment belongs to God and He alone is able to save and to destroy, and His Spirit does that settling in His own time and in His own way and without any assistance from either of us.

Leave the list in the drawer. Put the posts in the ground. Those two things can be true in the same man on the same morning and the sky over the ridge does not crack.

You are being handed a morning where mercy and an open question ride out on the same trailer. The Spirit set that possibility in you before you read a word of this, and Micah 6:8 says it in plain terms: do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. Three things. Not one of them is reach a final verdict about your neighbor before breakfast.