The Gate He Started Locking

Nine forty at night and the yard light is on. Wendell walks out to the gate the way he has walked out to it every night for eleven years, chain in his left hand, padlock in his right, and he thinks about it no more than a man thinks about the third stair.

Click.

For twenty years before that, the gate stood open. Not unlatched. Open, swung back flat against the post and grown into the grass, and it stayed that way through two droughts and a flood year. Anybody could come up. People did. The Pryor boys came for the wagon every September. Half the county borrowed his welder. A woman he had never met came up the lane at two in the morning in a coat over her nightclothes because her car had quit at the crossroads and she had seen his yard light, and Wendell drove her the eleven miles home and thought nothing of it and told nobody.

Then there was Dale.

Dale was nineteen and had nowhere, and Wendell fed him at his own table for most of a winter and taught him to run a bead with the stick welder. In March, over three or four nights, Dale cleaned out the shop. The welder. The chainsaw. And the socket set that had been Wendell's father's, the one with the wear worn into the handles where another man's hand used to be.

None of it ever came back. That is not the part that matters, and Wendell would tell you so himself.

The part that matters is that on the second of April he brought home a padlock and put it on the gate that night, and he has put it on every night since. Eleven years. And the padlock is fine. The padlock is sensible. Nobody who knows what happened would stand in that yard and tell him to take it off.

What Wendell cannot account for is the rest of it. The way he does not put the kettle on any more when a truck comes up the lane. The way he hears a need described at the feed store on a Saturday and finds that nothing at all moves in him, and he stands there with his face doing the right thing and his chest doing nothing whatsoever.

He locked a gate. Something else locked on the same night, quietly, and he never turned a key on that one.

You know the click. It was not a gate in your case, most likely. It was a phone you started letting ring out, or a street you started taking the long way around, or a sentence you used to say to people and have not said in years. And nobody has ever told you that you were wrong, because you were not wrong. What nobody warned you about was the other thing that shut on the same night, and how quiet it was, and how long it has been.

The Lock Is Not Your Character

I am going to say something now that you have been braced against for eleven years, so read it slowly.

You are keeping the lock.

Nobody in this message is coming for your padlock. Nobody is going to tell you that a merciful man leaves everything open to everybody, or that carefulness is a failure of love, or that what happened to you happened because of some deficiency in your faith. That is not true, it is not in the Book, and I will not say it over you.

You were right to protect what was yours, and God has never once held it against you. That is not me being soft on you. Scripture says the Lord knows our frame and remembers we are dust, and the Holy Spirit has never stood out at that gate at nine forty at night keeping score of a man with a chain in his hand.

Here is the thing to see, and it is the whole message.

A padlock is a piece of hardware. It hangs on a gate. It has one job, and it does that job whether you are warm or cold, generous or shut, awake or asleep. It cannot make a decision about anybody. It has no opinion. You are holding a key and a heart, and those are two entirely different objects. Proverbs 4:23 already told a man to guard his heart above everything else he keeps, and the Spirit is not asking you to hand your key to the first voice that turns up at your gate.

What happened to Wendell is not that he became a hard man. What happened is that a thing dried out. There is a difference, and everything turns on it. A hard man decides. A dried man does not decide anything at all; he simply finds one morning that the reflex which used to run out ahead of his thinking is not running any more, and he cannot say when it stopped.

You have not become somebody else. You are still the man who used to leave it open, and that man is not dead. That is Scripture, not sentiment, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it move: He restores the soul, and restoring is precisely what He does with a dried up part of a person, not with a wicked one.

New Every Morning, Without Being Asked

Now I want to put the verse in front of you, and I want you to notice who is speaking and where he is standing when he says it.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

The man writing that is sitting in the ruin of a burned city. He has watched the worst thing he can imagine happen to everything he loved. He is not writing from a good year. And in the middle of it he says the thing about the mornings.

Watch how the mercies arrive in that sentence. They are not earned. They are not requested. Nobody applies. They are simply new, again, in the morning, before anybody in that ruined city is awake to ask for them.

You are being met this morning by mercy that did not check yesterday first. It is written down, in Lamentations 3:23, that they are new every morning, and the same Spirit who put that line into a burned city is standing in your kitchen while you read it.

That is the order of things, and getting the order wrong is what makes this teaching cruel. Nobody softens by deciding to soften. You do not lie in bed and resolve to have feeling about people again, any more than a man resolves to be hungry. Something has to be poured in before anything can run out. You have been given something softer than you feel, and it is not your own manufacture. The Spirit put that in you before you read a word of this, and Ezekiel 36:26 says it in plain language: a heart of stone taken out, a heart of flesh given in its place.

And here is where the lock and the heart come apart for good.

Mercy does not require an open gate. It never did. Mercy is a need met, and a need can be met through a locked gate, over a fence, at arm's length, at a distance, by somebody you never see, on a road you do not walk down. Wendell can keep every bolt he owns and still be one of the most merciful men in that county by the end of the month. You are free to keep the lock and open your hands at the very same time. You are not taking my word for it. His word says to do good to all as we have opportunity, and the Spirit is what carries a sentence like that off a page and out to a road side on a Tuesday night.