The Field You Did Not Fight For

Nineteen years in March.

You know it was March because you signed it in a solicitor's office in Kendal with rain coming down the window, and because your uncle's funeral had been the November before, and because you had spent that whole winter not sleeping.

You could have won. That is the thing you have never said out loud to anybody except your wife, once, in the car afterwards. Two solicitors told you so. Not certainly, but probably, and probably was more than enough to spend four years and a great deal of money finding out.

And you would have won a field and lost a family, and you knew exactly what that trade was because you had watched it happen to the Hodgsons at Crook and there are two brothers there who did not speak for thirty-one years and one of them died first.

So you signed it. You went home and you did the milking.

Here is what nobody has ever said to you in nineteen years.

They said you did the right thing. Several people said it and they meant it, and your father-in-law said it in a way you have never forgotten.

Not one person has ever told you what you did it toward.

You have been at every christening. Every funeral. Your cousin's boy stayed with you for a year when things were bad at home and neither of you have ever mentioned to anybody what that year was. There is a family, still, in one piece, and you are the reason.

And nobody has ever named that as a thing you were for. It has only ever been described as something you gave up.

Abraham let a man choose first and got a description

There is a man in Hebrews who is described in a way that explains, better than anything else in the book, why a person lets go of ground.

For he looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.Hebrews 11:10

He looked for a city.

Now go back and remember what he had just done in his own story. He stood on a hill with a nephew and told him to take his pick, and the nephew took the good ground with the water, and the old man took what was left, and he did not argue.

He was not being soft. He was not even being generous, particularly. He was being accurate, because he was looking at something with foundations under it and had worked out that grass has none.

And that is a description of a direction and not a subtraction. Hebrews does not say he was the man who gave up the plain of Jordan. It says he was the man who looked for a city.

So take this now, nineteen years on. You are a man with a destination and not a man with a loss. The written word describes a person who let ground go by what he was looking toward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put that looking in you, and no one in nineteen years has been in a position to name it because most people only ever learn to talk about the giving up.

The family is not the consolation prize

Now I want to say something plainly, because the order of it has been wrong, and having it in the wrong order has cost you nineteen years of a certain kind of quiet.

You have been treating the family as what you were left with.

It is not what you were left with. It is what you were for. The written word settled that, and His Spirit has been carrying it ever since.

Think about that boy in your back bedroom for a year. Think about who else in that family could have had him. Nobody. Your cousin would not have asked a single other person in that whole connection, and he asked you, and the reason he could ask you is the exact reason you have been quietly grieving for nineteen years.

That was not the consequence of a sacrifice. That was the assignment.

I am not going to tell you the field did not matter. It was good ground and it was yours by any reasonable reckoning and your father worked it. Grieve it if you want to; a man is allowed.

But you have a purpose you have been living in and calling a loss, and His word names people by what they look toward, and the Holy Spirit has been running this since a solicitor's office in the rain.

The plain hall and what it did with people

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

It has been handed on since as a list of things a person does without. Preached that way it makes exactly your nineteen years: a man known for what he let go, with nobody whose job it was to tell him what the letting go was toward.

That is not what that room did. It sent people out into the streets around it every day of the week, and a person who came in having given something up was handed something to do with both hands, usually before the week was out.

You have had the giving without the sending, and the fault for that is not in you.

The written word describes a man who let ground go by the city he was looking for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the setting apart, and He has never once done it merely to make a hole.