Twelve Years On Rented Ground

There is a mile of that road where he could drive with his eyes shut and he takes it about twice a week, because it is the way to the merchant and there is no other way.

Left side, the whole length: his fences.

He put those in. Every post. He knows which ones went in during the wet autumn and gave him trouble and which stretch he did in three days with his son the year the boy was seventeen and could still be paid in food.

Beyond them, the field that never drained until he put the drains in. You can see where they run if you know what you are looking at, and in a wet March you can see it from the road, because the water goes where he sent it.

Twelve years. Not renewed. There was no falling out. The family that owns it took it back in hand, which they were entitled to do and which had been coming for about two years in the way these things come, in sentences that trail off at market.

And the sentence that arrives on that mile of road, twice a week, is not I miss the place. It is: twelve years of my life are sitting in another man's field and I have nothing that says I was there.

You know that sentence. It might not be land. It might be a house you rented and made good, or a business somebody else's name was on, or years you gave a family that has gone quiet. There is a thing you built with your hands and it belongs to somebody else, and you have no receipt, and driving past it is the same thing every time.

Somebody kept the record

There is a sentence in Hebrews with a strange shape, and the strangeness is the whole comfort of it.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

Look at how it is put. Not God remembers. That would be reassuring. What it says is that forgetting a life of work would be unrighteous, and God is not that. His Spirit does not misplace things either. It is the negative form, deliberately, because the writer is pushing on the exact fear you have on that mile of road: that a life's work can just be dropped, and nobody would be answerable for it.

Somebody would be answerable for it. That is what the sentence says. And He is not the sort to do it.

You are a man whose work is on record with God, and that record does not run through a tenancy agreement. That is what the written word says over you and not a warm thing I have chosen for a man in a truck, and the Holy Spirit who was with you in the wet autumn is the evidence that nothing you did on that ground fell out of anybody's hands.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic on that road. If God is not the forgetting kind, then twelve years of fences is information about who held the title deeds. It is not information about whether your work counted, and it never had the standing to become that.

The receipt was never the point, and this is not a lesson

Here is the second thing, and it is where the load comes off.

For two years the search has been on for something that says your name: a mark on a deed, an acknowledgment at market, a sentence from the family. It has not come and it is not coming, and the wanting of it is not vanity. A man wants his work to be real.

But there is something worse than the missing receipt, and it has been growing quietly. It is the suspicion that if nobody recorded it, it did not count.

You have been carried through every one of those twelve years, and the carrying was not part of any agreement that could lapse. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit who was at work in you on that ground rather than waiting to see whose name ended up on it.

And there is something worth saying flat out. Nothing here is going to tell you what those twelve years were for. Nothing here will say God was getting you ready, or that you would not be who you are without it. Those are sentences people say to farmers who have lost ground, and they are not in the text, and they turn a real loss into a course somebody enrolled you on without asking.

What is in the text is that He does not forget, and that nobody can trace out what He is doing. That is smaller and it will hold your weight.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought on a cold road. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not chewed on twice a week for two years. And the thing in the way is not the family, who were within their rights. It is a sentence: I have nothing that says I was there. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority in a truck on a Tuesday. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much of yourself was behind them.

If those twelve years have taken you somewhere darker than bitterness, and there are days you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.