The Fence Nobody Walks

The back line runs about four hundred feet along the north edge of the bottom field, and beyond it is a stretch of scrub that belongs to a man in another state who has not set foot on it since before the boy was born.

There is no road. There is no path. There is no gate on that line and no reason for one. The only creatures that go along it are deer and, twice a year, him.

Twelve posts had gone. Not fallen exactly. Leaning, in that way a cedar post leans when the bottom eighteen inches have quietly turned to sponge and the top is still perfectly sound and fools you every time. Push one with your hand and it gives about an inch, which is how you know.

He could have pulled them, set new ones in the same holes, backfilled with what came out, and been done by two in the afternoon. Everybody who has ever done fencing knows exactly what that sentence means. The same holes are wider than the new post. The backfill is the soil that already failed. It will hold for four years and then it will not, and by then the reason it did not hold is invisible.

What he does instead is dig twelve new holes, six inches off the old line, because the old holes are ruined and the line will not care about six inches. He tamps in layers, four inches at a time, gravel at the base, and he goes around each post with the bar until it rings rather than thuds. That is the difference. A properly set post rings.

It takes him two full days and most of a third.

Nobody will ever know. Not the neighbor in another state. Not his wife, who knows he was fencing and does not know there was a choice involved. Not his son, who would have to have been standing there for the two seconds at the second post when he thought about the shortcut and did not take it.

Here is what makes it interesting rather than merely admirable. He is not a rigid man. He has cut corners in his life and he could name a few. Something specific happened at that second post, and it was not a rule and it was not discipline. It was closer to a refusal. He looked at the ruined hole and thought, more or less, I am not going to build a lie into this fence and then walk away from it.

And then he dug, and nobody saw, and there is no evidence anywhere in the world that the moment took place.

You will have a version. The thing you did right when doing it wrong was available, cheaper, faster and completely undetectable. And the strange loneliness afterwards, which is not regret and is not pride, but is something like standing in a field holding a decision that has nowhere to go.

What Samuel got wrong, and what he was told

There is a moment in Samuel that I keep coming back to, and the reason is that it catches a prophet being wrong, which is worth noticing.

Samuel is sent to a household to anoint a king, and the oldest son walks in, and Samuel takes one look at him and is certain. Tall, presentable, exactly what a king looks like. And God stops him.

But the Lord said to Samuel, "Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart."1 Samuel 16:7

Read the middle clause slowly, because it is the load-bearing one. The Lord sees not as man sees. This is not a verse about God being nicer than people. It is a verse about God using an entirely different instrument. Man reads surfaces because surfaces are all that are available to him. God reads the other thing, and He reads it as directly as you read a sentence.

So the two seconds at the second post are not a private event with no witness. They are the part God was actually looking at. You are being read at the level where the decision happened, and you were read there at the time. That is what 1 Samuel 16 says in its own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line spoken in a courtyard three thousand years ago and stands it up in the bottom field.

And notice which way round the correction runs. Samuel is not told that God also sees the heart, as a supplement. He is told that the outward appearance is the thing being disregarded. The visible is what got demoted in that sentence. Which means the fence that anybody could inspect is not the primary object, and never was.

That reverses the shape of the loneliness. The feeling in the field was that the decision had nowhere to go. But if God reads hearts the way men read faces, then the decision did not need anywhere to go. It was already in the only place that was ever going to matter, at the instant it was made, before the shovel went in.

You have been fully read, in the two seconds nobody could have witnessed, and the written word says the Lord looks on the heart, and His Spirit is what turns that from a fact about God into something a man can carry back across a field.

What the fence is not

Now let me be careful, because there is a way of taking that which turns a good fence into a bad thing.

The twelve posts are not purchasing anything. There is no account. Nothing about two days and a third makes God more favorable than He was on Monday morning, and nothing about the shortcut would have made Him less so.

The crown in Scripture is placed on a head by somebody else. It shows up as a gift every single time, and in the one glimpse we get of people holding theirs, they take them off and throw them down. That is not the behavior of men who have been paid.

And there is no ranking. The man who tamped in layers is not further along than the neighbor who has never once thought about the back line. That comparison is not in this book, and a hidden life that starts keeping score against a visible one has traded something true for something exhausting.

You are held by a regard that was settled before the first post went in, and you were held by it on the days you took the shortcut, because the written word puts our standing on Christ and never on our record, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a floor rather than a phrase.

Which, oddly, is what makes the good fence possible. A man tamping in layers to buy something is doing anxious work. A man tamping in layers because a lie in a fence is a lie whether or not anybody reads it is doing free work. You have been working out of something already given rather than toward something withheld, and Scripture is what establishes that, and His Spirit is what keeps it from wearing off by Thursday.