The Cross on the Hill Above the Road

It is on the ridge above the road and you see it for about four seconds coming from the north.

Nobody in the village seems to know exactly when it went up. There is a plaque at the gate at the bottom that has gone illegible and a story about a family who lost two sons, and another story about a wreck, and neither of them holds up if you look into it.

She drives that road perhaps twice a week.

And she slows down. Not much. Enough to make the four seconds into about seven, and enough that a car behind her once put its lights on.

She has been doing it for about a year and she has never told anybody and she is not, in any sense she would recognize, a religious person. She left all that behind at nineteen and does not think about it, and would be entirely comfortable saying so at a dinner table.

But there is a cross on a hill above a road and she takes her foot off the accelerator every time.

And what she cannot get past, and what she has thought about far more than she would admit, is that she does not know what she is doing when she does it.

She is not praying. She is not thinking about anything in particular. She is not remembering church, which was mostly fine and is mostly gone.

She is looking at it. That is the entire content. And it seems to her, at forty-three, that looking at something cannot possibly be a real thing to do, and that a woman who slows her car for seven seconds twice a week for a year is either doing something or wasting her time, and she cannot tell which.

Something was lifted up so that people could look and live

Let me put down the thing that will make the rest of this bearable to read.

Nothing here is going to ask you for anything. Not to go back to anything, not to decide anything, not to reconsider nineteen. You left, and that is yours, and a stranger writing about a road you drive is in no position to say a word about any of it.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as an approach: looking at something is a real thing to do, and there is a passage where it is the entire instruction. That is not my convenient framing of a year of slowing down, it is what stands written in John's third chapter, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that page has been on that ridge for the year you have been taking your foot off the accelerator.

Read what Jesus says about Himself by reaching back into an old story.

Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in Him.John 3:14-15

The old story He points at is a strange one. A people in the desert in serious trouble, and a bronze thing put on a pole, and the whole of what anybody had to do was look at it.

Not understand it. Not resolve their situation. Not sort out what they thought about the desert or the leadership or the last forty years. Look, and live.

And the thing on the pole had no power in it whatsoever. It was bronze. It was the direction that mattered and the promise at the end of it, and the moment anybody stopped at the object rather than looking along it, the whole thing had gone wrong.

So this is yours right now rather than pending your working out what you are doing: the looking is not nothing, and it never was, because the written word makes looking the entire instruction in the story Jesus chose to explain Himself with, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept a piece of wood on a ridge in front of you twice a week for a year.

Now let me say the thing about the seven seconds, because you have been asking the wrong question about them.

You keep asking what you are doing. Try asking what is being done, because what is written says no one comes unless they are drawn, and the Holy Spirit does the drawing without asking for a theory first.

You take your foot off. That is not a decision you make at the bend; by the time you notice, it has happened. Something in you is turning toward a thing on a hill before the part of you that left at nineteen has been consulted, and it has been happening for a year, and it does not require your permission or your explanation.

That is not you doing something. That is you being drawn, and what is written says nobody comes unless they are drawn, and the Holy Spirit does not need a person to have a theory about the drawing before He does it.

And here is the whole of the guard, and it is where this article stops: through, not at. The cross on that hill is two pieces of timber and some bolts and it does not know you are there. Everything that goes up that line goes past it, to a Person, and this article has nothing at all to say about what you should do about that beyond telling you that the line is real.