Back to the Same Barn

The boots are by the door and they go on at five, and they have gone on at five since 1999, and there is a particular sound the left one makes that he stopped hearing about a decade ago and hears again when he is tired.

The round is the round. He could describe it to you in eleven minutes and it would sound like nothing, because a round always sounds like nothing when it is described, and it takes four hours and it has to be right.

He is fifty eight. There is nobody coming after him, which he is at peace with more days than not. The land will go, in the way land goes, and it will be somebody's and they will farm it and that is fine.

Tomorrow is the same. Not a bad same. He wants that understood before anything else. There are mornings in September when the light comes across the top field and he has stood still with a bucket in his hand for a whole minute like a fool, and there are three or four of those a year and they are enough.

But tomorrow is the same, and so is the day after, and it is the round it was in 1999, and there is no version in which it becomes something else.

Here is the thing that arrives, and it does not arrive every day, and it arrived on Tuesday, standing at the gate at ten past five with everything still to do.

It is not that it is pointless. He would knock that down in a sentence. It is closer to: what am I taking into this. Not what will come of it. He has stopped asking what will come of it, some years ago, and that was a good day when he stopped. What he wants is something to carry through the gate at ten past five, and he does not have a word for what that would be and he would be embarrassed to try to say it to anybody.

You will have your own gate at ten past five. The same day in front of you and nothing in your hands going into it.

The word Paul uses, and the word he does not

There is a verse in Galatians that gets quoted at tired people, usually badly, and the way it is usually quoted takes the wrong half.

And let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap, if we do not give up.Galatians 6:9

People quote the harvest. And there it is, and Paul says it, and I am not going to take it out of the verse. But I am also not going to hand him a picture of it, because Paul does not, and in due season is a phrase with no date on it and no description attached, and the moment anybody supplies either they have started making things up.

So look at what the verse actually gives him to carry, which is the first clause.

Let us not grow weary. And the word to stop on is us.

Paul is not issuing an instruction to an individual to be more resilient. It is first person plural. He puts himself in it. He is a man writing to a church, saying let us, which means the sentence is not somebody standing outside a tired life telling it to keep going.

So take it plainly: you are inside an us rather than under an instruction, and that is what Galatians 6 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the end of a letter and lays it down at a gate at ten past five.

And notice that grow weary is not the same as be tired. The Greek is about losing heart, going slack in the middle, the specific thing where a person is still doing the round and has gone out of it somewhere. He is not being told to be less tired. He is fifty eight and does four hours before breakfast and being tired is not the problem and was never the thing being addressed.

You have been told to keep your heart in it rather than to stop being tired, because the written word distinguishes those two and does not confuse them the way people quoting it do, and His Spirit is what makes that reach a man at a gate with everything still to do.

And that is nearly the answer to what he wanted to carry, but not quite, and the last part is in the word good. Doing good. Paul assumes, without arguing for it, that the round is good. Not productive. Not leading somewhere. Good, as a description of the thing itself, at five in the morning, whether or not anybody is coming after him. You have been doing something the word simply calls good, and Scripture is what settles that rather than my admiration, and His Spirit is the one who makes a settled thing something a man can pick up and take through a gate.

What this will not be turned into

Now the guardrail, and it matters at the end of a site like this.

Nobody is going to tell him what the harvest is. Paul does not describe it, in due season has no date on it, and if I put a picture there I would be building furniture for a room I have never seen.

And nobody is going to tell him that twenty six years is producing something in him. It is not a refining process and it is not a curriculum, and a man standing at a gate does not need his own life explained back to him as a mechanism.

And nobody is going to use tomorrow to make today lighter. The tiredness is the size it is. Naming what is ahead is not a way of shrinking a Tuesday.

And the twenty six years are not accruing anywhere. There is no account. The crown in this book is placed on a head by somebody else and thrown down, and nobody in that scene has been paid for early mornings.

You are held by a regard that has nothing to do with how many rounds you have done, because the written word puts our standing on Christ rather than on our record, and His Spirit is what makes that a floor rather than a phrase. You have nothing ahead of you to earn, and Scripture is what settles that, and His Spirit keeps a morning from becoming an installment.