Thirty Years Of Being Polite About A Fence

Eleven feet. That is the whole of it. Eleven feet of ground along the top corner where the wall turns, and it has been under a hedge since about 1961 and it grows nothing worth having.

His father moved the fence in the spring of 1994 and your father was alive and said nothing, and by the time your father died it had been there four years and there was no way to raise it without raising all of it.

So you have been a good neighbor for thirty years. Genuinely. Not through gritted teeth either, or not mostly.

You have pulled him out of a ditch in the snow. You lent him the topper for a fortnight the year his went. When his wife was ill you did his lambing on top of yours and you never once mentioned it afterwards, to him or to anybody, which is the thing your own wife is proudest of about you.

And here is what happens when his truck comes up the road.

There is a thing that goes through you, from about the middle of the chest down to the stomach, and it takes about a second and a half, and it has been exactly the same for thirty years.

You could set a clock by it. Same length. Same place. Same everything.

Thirty years of being the best neighbor on that road, and the thing has not shrunk by a hair. And a man who works with ground knows exactly what that means, because you have spent your whole life watching what happens when a thing is cut back at the top every year and never once dug out at the root.

It gets stronger. That is what happens. Every year you take the top off it, it puts down more underneath.

The letter to the Hebrews uses your word

There is a warning in Hebrews that is written in the language of a man who has worked ground, and it is not a warning about behavior at all.

Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.Hebrews 12:15

A root. Not a branch, not a fruit, not a leaf. The word is chosen and it is chosen by somebody who knew that the visible part of a thing is not the part that decides whether it lives.

And notice the second half of that written line, because it is the part that has been quietly true on your road for thirty years, and the Holy Spirit has been pointing at it. Thereby many be defiled. A root does not stay in one square yard. It runs. It comes up in places you were not looking at and had no reason to connect with the top corner where the wall turns.

Ask yourself how you are about his son. Ask yourself about the shape of the sentence you use when his name comes up at the mart.

So take this now, before we go further. You are not a bad neighbor and I am not going to let you take that away from this page. The written word says the trouble is at the root and never at the top, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets down to a root, and thirty years of good behavior was never going to reach it because behavior works at the surface. That is all it can do.

The thirty years were not wasted

Now I want to be careful, because there is a sermon here that would take a good man and hand him thirty years of guilt he does not owe, and I have heard it preached and it does damage.

Nothing you did was hypocrisy. Hear that plainly. Lending the topper was real. The lambing was real. The ditch in the snow in February was real and the man would have been in trouble without you.

A man who does the right thing while something is running underneath is not a fraud. He is a man doing the only half of the job that was ever in his hands.

The other half was never yours. You cannot dig out a root in your own chest any more than you can dig one out of somebody else's field from your own kitchen. The reach is not there. It was never there.

And the reason nobody told you is that most preaching on this hands you a management plan. Forgive him again. Pray for him. Try harder to feel differently. All of which is topping, and you have been topping it for thirty years, and it is stronger now than it was.

You have a God who works at the root. His word puts the whole problem down there and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the digging, and you have not failed at a job you were never given.

What was preached in a plain hall

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee would not let anybody rent a seat, and the thing he preached in that plain room was a clean heart: God's own work, on the inside, given to people who had been treated as though they were not the sort who got one.

The plain room and the doctrine came out of the same conviction and they have to stay together.

Because preached anywhere else, this turns into a standard. It becomes a level a man is behind on, and then it becomes a quiet grading of Christians, and then a man of sixty with a thing that goes through him for a second and a half hears the whole message as an accusation and stops listening, correctly.

In a room with no reserved seats it stays what it is. A gift. Handed to somebody with nothing, doing what they could not do.

There is nothing here you can fail. There is only something you can ask for, and the written word puts the asking in your hands and everything else in His, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a better man to come along first.