Thirty Years of Proving It

He had held up his end at the feed store for thirty years.

Every Thursday, more or less, standing by the sacked corn while the talk got round to it, and it always got round to it. He was good. He was not mean about it and he did not corner anybody, and over three decades he had built up an honest set of answers that could stand a bit of weight. He knew the difference between a thing he could prove and a thing he could only argue for, and he was careful about the line.

He had walked two men most of the way, back in the nineties. He was proud of that in a quiet way and he never mentioned it.

And somewhere in there he had stopped being reached himself.

Not stopped believing. He would have told you flat out that he believed every word, and he would have been telling the truth. But the last time anything had actually gone through him and come out the other side, he could not say. It had become a thing he defended rather than a thing that happened to him. Like a fence you maintain on a field you no longer walk across.

Then the first Sunday in June they had the old singing up at Bethel Ridge, the way they do, and his sister-in-law made him come.

Wooden benches. No instruments. A hundred and ten people, most of them related to each other, and a woman near eighty who took the first verse on her own before anybody else came in.

She was not a great singer. Her voice went thin at the top of the line and she did not always find the note straight away.

And on the second line of the second verse it came through the middle of him like weather, and he had to put his hand flat on the bench in front of him and keep it there.

He did not say one word to anybody on the way home. There was nothing to say. Nobody had put an argument to him and he had not been asked to answer anything, and he was seventy-one years old and something had reached him for the first time since he could remember.

Thirty years by the sacked corn, and something got past you anyway

I want to say something about the thirty years first, because I am not about to knock them over.

Standing your ground kindly for three decades in a feed store is a good life's work. Those answers were honest and you kept them honest, which is more than most manage, and two men walked further because you did. If anybody tells you the reasons do not matter, they are not paying attention, and they are not saying it here.

But hear this, and take it as settled rather than as comfort: you have not gone cold. That thing you have been calling a fence around an unwalked field is not the truth about you. That is not my kind assessment of a good man, it is what stands written in the nineteenth Psalm, where the sky preaches every night with no speech and no words at all, and the same Holy Spirit who carried the sky's sermon carried an eighty year old woman's thin high note straight into your chest on a Sunday morning.

Read what the psalm actually claims. It is a bigger claim than people notice.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day after day they pour forth speech, night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words, no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth.Psalm 19:1-4

No speech. No words. And it still counts as declaring and proclaiming and revealing knowledge.

So you have been carrying a rule you never got from Scripture, which is that the real communication happens in sentences and everything else is decoration. Nothing in the written word supports it. The sky has been preaching over that feed store the whole thirty years, and the Spirit of God has never once needed a paragraph to reach a man.

Here is the second thing, and it is the one that will free you if you let it.

An argument is something you answer. That is what it is for. Thirty years of practice has trained your whole mind to hear an approach and step into position, and you do it now before you know you are doing it, and that is why nothing has reached you in a decade. Not hardness. Habit. And a habit is not a heart, whatever your accuser has been telling you, because the written word says God looks past what is on the outside and the Holy Spirit is the one who reads a man properly.

Beauty does not come at you as an approach. It came in at Bethel Ridge on a thin voice you had no position to take against, and you were reached because for four minutes you were not on duty.

And this is yours right now, not once you have thought about it properly: you are allowed off duty. The word says the sky proclaims without words and the Spirit is the one making that proclamation land, so a morning where you answer nobody and defend nothing is not a lapse in your calling. It is where you get fed.