Mending The Same Wire

The pliers live in the right coat pocket and they have lived there so long that the lining has gone through and been sewn twice.

Gray before sunrise. Not dark, not light, the hour where everything is the color of a nickel and the grass is gray and wet and the birds have started but have not committed. He walks the line the way he has walked it for a long time now, not looking for trouble exactly, just looking, the way a man reads a page he has read before.

Two hundred yards down he comes to it. The same sagging span. Third post from the corner, where the ground goes soft after rain and the wire pulls and the staple works loose, and it has done this more times than he could tell you.

He mends it. Takes the pliers out. Pulls the slack, resets the staple, works the twist back in. Four minutes. He has done it in the dark. He has done it with a torn hand. He has done it on the morning after a funeral, because it does not stop being loose because something happened to you.

Then he stands up and looks down the line and thinks the thing he thinks every single time, and has never said to anybody, because there is nobody out here to say it to and he would not say it if there were:

If I stop coming out here, this whole place goes down inside a season.

Not the fence. He does not mean the fence. He means everything: the land, the family, the thing his father started, the whole arrangement that runs on somebody being out here in the gray and nobody knowing about it. He has come to believe, without ever consciously deciding to, that he is the reason it holds.

He puts the pliers back in the pocket. The birds commit. He walks on.

That is you, and your fence line might be a schedule, or a Sunday phone call, or a set of accounts you check even though somebody else checks them, or a marriage you have been holding together single handed and have never once described that way out loud.

Two plain things before anything else. If your version of this includes somebody frightening you or hurting you, nothing on this page is telling you to keep walking the line and taking it; tell one person today who can act, your doctor, a crisis line where you live, one friend who will come. And whatever this is, it is not a person. Not the ones who never came out here. Not the one at the house. Scripture is direct that the struggle is not against flesh and blood, and that is a mercy rather than a technicality, because it means you can stop losing to somebody you also love.

Somebody is already out ahead of you on this line

Moses is talking to people who are afraid of what is in front of them, and he says a thing about position that a man on a fence line needs.

The LORD your God which goeth before you, he shall fight for you, according to all that he did for you in Egypt before your eyes.Deuteronomy 1:30

Goeth before you. That is the part. Not alongside, though He is that too. Not behind, holding things together after a man has passed. Before. Out ahead. Already down at the corner post while the gate is still being opened.

Which means the walking you have been doing has never been first. Somebody has been out on that line ahead of you every morning of your life, and the reason the place has held is not that you got there at the right hour with the right tool.

You have not been the first one down this line, and you were never what was holding it. That is not a comforting thought for a man in the gray: Deuteronomy 1:30 puts God out ahead and puts the fighting on Him, in plain words to frightened people, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a released thing stay released in a body that has been getting up early for years rather than the amount of diligence anybody can keep up.

And notice what Moses adds, because it is not decoration. According to all that he did for you in Egypt before your eyes. He appeals to what they have already watched Him do. He does not say trust Me about the future. He says look at the record.

There is a record out here too. Every season this place did not go down. All of them got filed under diligence, and the filing was wrong.

Stopping is not the same as letting it go

Here is the fear underneath, and it deserves saying plainly.

The fear is that easing off means abandoning it. That the day the pliers stay in the drawer is the day a man becomes the sort who let his father's place slide. Years of walking have fused the caring and the carrying so completely that there is no seam left to get a blade into.

They are not the same thing, and Scripture does not treat them as one.

Handing a thing back to God is not walking away from it. The man who stops believing he is the reason it holds does not stop walking the line; he stops being the guarantor of the line, which is a post he was never appointed to, that nobody put him in, and that he has held without relief for a long time.

You were never the last thing standing between this place and ruin, and God did not put you in that position. The written word says the Lord goes before and fights, and the Spirit of God is the one carrying what a man is not built to carry, never the man's stamina.

Let me be exact about the thing that matters most on this page, because it has been quietly carried by somebody reading this. Nothing that has happened out here is a report on how faithfully you walked. If something hard has come, it did not come because you missed a morning. Nobody buys an outcome with diligence and nobody forfeits one by resting. That arithmetic is not anywhere in Scripture, and where it has been implied to you it was implied wrongly.

You have not been sitting an examination that God has been marking at first light. The word puts the fighting on Him in a sentence with no conditions attached, and His Spirit has been holding this place every season you thought your boots were the reason.