Counting Rings in the Yard

The maul comes down and the round falls open in two clean halves, and the inside of the wood is the color of new cream.

It is the middle of an October afternoon and he is working through a box elder that came down in the wind in August. He has a rhythm going. Set the round on the block, read the checks in the end grain, swing once, stack. There are leaves all over everything and the wheelbarrow is half loaded and the whole yard smells like sap and cold ground.

Then he stops, because the face of this one is clean enough to read.

He crouches down and puts a thumbnail on the pith and starts counting outward. Some of the rings are wide, the way they get in a wet year. Some are so tight together he has to tilt the piece into the light to separate them, and those are the dry years, the summers the pump ran all July. He counts. He loses the place twice. He comes out at thirty one.

Thirty one.

And he stays crouched there longer than a man needs to, with his forearms on his knees and the maul lying in the leaves beside him, because thirty one is a number he already knows. Thirty one years since the night he gave his life to Jesus in a folding chair in a borrowed room, and meant it, and has meant it every year since.

So he tries to do for himself what he just did for the tree. He tries to find the rings.

And he cannot name one. That is the honest report. He knows he prays more than he did. He thinks he is slower to blow up than he was, though he could not swear to it. He is not aware of one clear year where something in him widened out, and he certainly could not sit at a table and tell a younger man what thirty one years produced.

The wind moves through the yard and turns some of the leaves over and the light goes flat for a second, and he thinks the thing he would never say out loud to anybody at church. Thirty one years. If somebody asked me tonight what is different about me, I would have nothing to hand them.

You know the crouch. You may have twelve years in, or forty. But somewhere in you there is a page you have never been able to fill in, and every so often something makes you look at it again.

A ring is laid in a year nobody remembers

Here is the first thing to know about the wood he is holding, and it is a mercy.

That tree did not lay one of those rings on purpose. It never made a decision about the wide ones. It did not fail at the tight ones. Every ring is the record of a year of weather, laid down in a layer thinner than paper by a process that ran while the tree stood there doing nothing at all but standing there.

Scripture has that in it, and it is the psalm this whole shelf is built on. You are a tree planted, and the planting was somebody else's work. Psalm 1:3 says the man who stays near the water brings forth fruit in his season and does not wither, and it is His Spirit who is the river and not your discipline, so the growing was never a thing you were meant to run.

And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither.Psalm 1:3

Read what the tree does in that verse. It gets planted, which happens to it. It stands near water, which is a location and not an effort. And then fruit comes, in season, on a schedule that is never handed to the tree.

Jesus said the same thing in a shorter way. A man scatters seed, and sleeps, and rises night and day, and the seed springs up and grows, and he does not know how. Mark 4:27. The not knowing how is not written as a problem in that sentence. It is written as the ordinary condition of everybody who has ever grown anything.

You have thirty one years of standing near the water, and the ring for each of those years went on whether you felt it or not. The written word puts the increase on God rather than on the planter, and the Holy Spirit has been doing the widening in seasons you cannot recall one detail of. Wet years. Dry years. The July the pump ran all month.

The tree is the last one to know

Now the harder half, and it is not a rebuke.

Nobody alive is worse placed to see your rings than the man who owns them. He has stood inside the whole thing the entire time, at a distance of zero, watching daily, which is exactly the distance at which growth becomes invisible. A man does not see his own children get taller. He sees it in a photograph, or he hears it from his sister at Thanksgiving.

So the blank page is not evidence. It is a viewing angle.

You were never given the job of certifying your own growth, and the blank page is not a bad report. Scripture hands the searching of a heart to God in Psalm 139 rather than to the person who owns it, and the same Spirit who searches is described as the Comforter, which tells you what He is doing down there and what He is not.

If you want a look from a better angle, ask somebody who has known you fifteen years. Not to be reassured. Ask them the way you would ask a neighbor about your own fence line, and then be quiet and let them talk. They will not describe the thing you would describe. They will say something about how you are with waiters now. Or about a sentence you used to finish and now let go. Or about a stretch of years when they braced whenever your name came up on a phone, and how long it has been since they braced.

And if nobody comes to mind and the asking is not possible today, that changes nothing about the wood. The rings were in that box elder for thirty one years before a maul ever opened it up.

You have rings under the bark of this year as well, and no witness is required for them to be there. The word says in Hebrews 6:10 that God is not unjust to forget the work and the love shown toward His name, and the same Spirit who keeps that account is not waiting on a neighbor to confirm it.

When the crouch has gone dark

There is a version of this afternoon that is heavier than a blank page, and I am not going to walk past it.

You were never left to work a flat season out by yourself. Psalm 68:6 says God sets the solitary in families, and a good deal of what His Spirit does in a season like this arrives through people with names and phone numbers and a free evening.

So if not being able to name anything has slid into something darker, if the mornings are heavy and the sleep is wrong and the whole yard has gone gray on him, that is not a spiritual grade and it is not something to work out alone with a maul. Go and see a doctor, because a body that has quit making what it needs puts a gray cast over everything a man believes about himself. Make an appointment with a counselor and keep it. Give a pastor the true version. And if the nights this month have gone well past regret, into wondering whether the place would be simpler with him gone off it, get on the phone to 988 this evening and not tomorrow, and get one person to drive out and sit in the yard. None of that competes with what God is doing under this grass. All of it is how He has tended to do it.