The Gate Left Open Again

Dusk, and the light is going off the top of the hedge, and Gil is standing at the kitchen window with a dish towel over his shoulder, looking down the slope at the bottom gate.

Open. Swung right back on its hinge, the way it swings when somebody goes through on the four wheeler and does not stop.

Third time this week. Ninth time this month, though he stopped counting out loud a while ago because counting out loud in front of Deb turns into something neither of them enjoys.

Toby is seventeen and he is not a bad kid and that is the whole difficulty of it. He does the water. He does the water every evening without being asked, in the rain, in the dark, in the week his shoulder was strapped up, and he has never once complained about it. He simply cannot hold that gate in his head on the way back. Something happens between the trough and the yard and the gate is gone out of his mind, and Gil has said it every way that a man is able to say a thing.

He has said it kindly. He has said it as a joke. He has drawn it on the back of an envelope and stuck it on the fridge. He has said it in the truck on the way to town with the radio off, in the good voice, the one he has to load up beforehand. He has said it at the table in front of everybody, which he still regrets. He has said it once, at the end of a long August, in a way that put a look on that boy's face he has not been able to get rid of since.

And here is the thing that has him standing at this window with a dish towel on his shoulder instead of walking down.

He has run out of ways to say it.

Every version left in him now has something else riding on the back of it. He can hear it before it comes out. Not anger, exactly. Anger would be simpler and would burn off. It is the other thing, the flat one, the one that has started to come into his voice on the words "the gate" like a stain that will not wash, and Gil can hear it, and Deb can hear it, and he is nearly sure Toby can hear it too, and he despises it.

Down the slope the gate hangs open in the last of the light. Sixty yards. Thirty seconds of latch.

You know this window. It is not a gate in your house, most likely. It is the same door left unlocked, the same cup left where the cup gets left, the same question asked at the same hour by somebody whose memory is going, the same thing you have already said until saying it has begun to change you. And what frightens you is not the thing itself. It is what your own voice has started to sound like on the way to it.

As Thy Days, So Shall Thy Strength Be

There is a line in the blessing Moses spoke over the tribes at the end of his life, and it is one of the most practical sentences in the whole Book.

Thy shoes shall be iron and brass; and as thy days, so shall thy strength be.Deuteronomy 33:25

Read the measurement in it. Not as thy years. Not as thy whole remaining life with this person, all of it, weighed up and issued to you in one lump this evening at the kitchen window. As thy days.

That is how it comes. Daily. In the size of a day.

You have been trying to carry every night at once, and it was never a shortage of strength. Deuteronomy 33:25 already set the measure, as your days so shall your strength be, and the Spirit issues it in that size deliberately, because a man handed a year's worth in one evening would not be able to lift it off the counter.

That is what is standing at the window. It is not sixty yards. Gil could do sixty yards on a broken ankle. What he cannot do is the sixty yards multiplied by every evening between now and whenever this stops, which he cannot see, which may be years, and that sum is what has him holding a dish towel and going nowhere.

You are being given exactly tonight's portion, and tonight's portion is enough for tonight. That is Scripture, not sentiment, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it move: the manna came down daily, six mornings out of seven, and it never once came in a year's supply, and the people who tried to hold extra found out why by morning.

You were not built to hold a whole future in a single evening. You are not taking my word for it. His word says to take no thought for tomorrow, because the day has trouble enough of its own, and the Spirit is what carries a line like that off a page and down a wet slope at dusk with a flashlight.

Mercy At Close Range

Now let me say the thing about the near ones, because everybody knows it and almost nobody says it.

Mercy to a stranger is a clean thing. It has edges. You stop, you help, you go home, and you carry away a good feeling that lasts most of the week.

Mercy to the one in your own house has no edges at all. There is no going home, because you are home. There is no end date. There is no good feeling, because it happened again last night and it is happening again now and it is going to be there in the morning wearing your kitchen like it owns it. And nobody claps.

You are standing in the hardest kind of mercy there is, and God has never undervalued it. It is written down, in Hebrews 6:10, that God is not unjust to forget your work and the love you have shown toward His name in serving people, and the same Spirit who put that sentence into a letter written to worn out believers is in your kitchen this evening.

Hear that carefully. Not forgotten. Nine gates this month, and not one of them dropped out of Heaven's account of your life.

You have been shutting that gate as an act of love, whether or not one thing in you felt like love at the time. The Spirit knew that about you long before you did, and 1 Corinthians 13:4 says it plainly: love suffers long, and is kind. Suffering long is not an emotion. It is a length. You have been doing love in the only unit it is measured in.

And now the other thing, and I am going to say it straight because a man reading this at a window deserves straight.

There is forgetfulness and there is harm, and they are not the same, and mercy has never meant staying inside something that is hurting you. If what is happening in your house is not a boy who cannot remember a latch, if somebody there is being damaged, frightened, or made unsafe, then endurance is not the answer and nobody on this page is asking you for it. You are free to say plainly that something at home is not safe, and God is not asking you to endure harm to prove you are merciful. No sentence of mine makes that permission. Scripture does, where it says a prudent man sees danger and hides himself, and His Spirit is the One who gives a person the nerve to go and get help. Getting help is the right move. It is not a failure of mercy and it never was.