Four Times, Same Lean

He sees it from forty yards out and he knows before he gets there.

It is the second week of August and he has come down the lane to shut the gate for the night, the way he does, with the truck still running and the door open and the radio on low. The gate is dragging. There is a fresh groove scraped in the dirt where the bottom rail has been cutting an arc all summer, deeper this week than last.

The corner post has gone over again.

Not far. Nobody driving past would see it. He can see it because he has been looking at this post since he bought the place, and because there is a line of good posts running away from it up the hill and this one has quit agreeing with them.

He puts his shoulder against it out of habit and it gives, the way a post gives when the dirt around it has stopped holding.

He has reset this post four times in nine years, and he could tell you every one. The first time he pulled it, dug the hole deeper, packed it with gravel and tamped it until his arms shook. The second time he set a new post beside it. The third time he braced it off the line post with a wire and a stick twist. The fourth time was two springs ago and he did all of it at once, properly, the way his father would have, and he stood back and looked at it and thought that was that.

August. Same lean. Same side.

He shuts the gate with a lift under the bottom rail so it will latch, which is what a man does when he has stopped expecting the fix to hold, and he stands there a minute with the truck running behind him.

And what is in his head is not the post.

It is the thing he has carried since he was twenty two. He has never named it in a room. He has prayed about it more times than he has reset this post. He has read on it, fasted over it, made three separate covenants with himself about it in three separate Januaries, and every one of those was honest and every one of them held for a while, and then August came.

Twenty years. Same lean. Same side.

You know that gate. Yours has no cedar in it. Yours might be a drawer you do not open, or the second glass, or a way of going quiet for three days that everyone in your house can feel coming. And you have set it right more than four times, and you meant it every single time.

The post is telling the truth

Start here, because everything else in this article stands on it. That post is not lying to him. It leans because something under it is real.

Jesus said it in a way nobody has improved on.

For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his own fruit: for of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes.Luke 6:43-44

Read carefully what that does and does not say. It says fruit reports on the tree. It never once tells anybody to go out and fix the fruit. There is no verse anywhere that says tie better figs onto the branches and the tree will follow, and there is no verse that says keep resetting the post and the ground will finally agree.

You are a good tree with one branch that keeps reporting on old ground, and the one branch does not reclassify the tree. Scripture says a person in Christ is a new creation, and the Holy Spirit was given as the seal on that, which means the lean at the gate is a real report about real ground and it is not a report on who you belong to.

I want to say the next part with some heat, because this is where good people get hurt. That thing in you is not a demon riding your back and it is not something laid on your family line by somebody two generations up. It is not a punishment. And there is no key you failed to find, no verse you have not been told, no conference you missed. Anybody who has ever sold you a key was selling something.

You have been honest for twenty years about something most people bury, and that honesty is not nothing. The written word calls a broken and a contrite heart the offering God does not despise, and His Spirit is the one who has kept you honest about it instead of letting you go numb.

What a post hole cannot reach

Now the ground.

In cold country a post heaves because water gets into the soil under it, freezes, and lifts. A man with a post hole digger goes down as far as a man with a post hole digger goes. Below that is a whole other country: the frost line, the hardpan, water moving sideways through clay in a way nobody standing on the grass can see. Reset the post at four feet and the ground at six feet does not care.

That is not a failure of the man. It is a fact about arms.

Scripture puts the sanctifying itself on the God of peace in 1 Thessalonians 5, and His Spirit is the one who moves in ground where the water sits all winter. You were never issued a tool that reaches this, and the tool you are missing was never a virtue you are missing.

And here is where I part company with most of what gets said about a stubborn thing in a person. The usual counsel is that a man should dig deeper. Try harder. Go further down. But a post hole digger only reaches what a post hole digger reaches, and a man cannot become his own excavator by resolving to be one at the start of a January.

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts.Psalm 139:23

That is a man handing over the digging. Notice he does not offer to help. Notice there is no plan attached to it.

You have a God whose reach starts where every tool you own gives out. Psalm 139 has Him already acquainted with all your ways before a word gets to your tongue, and the Spirit is described as the one who searches even the deep things of God, which puts the depth of that search well past anything a January covenant was ever going to touch.

Nobody is asking you to say it in a room

I am not going to require you to name this thing to a person. Not to a small group, not to a stage, not to me. Some things get named to God alone and stay there, and there is no rule in Scripture that says otherwise.

You have every right to bring this thing to God without an audience, and it goes just as deep spoken to a ceiling. It is written that God knows the secret things and rewards what is done in secret, and the Holy Spirit does not need a witness in the room to carry a sentence up.

But there is a line, and it is worth saying plainly. If the thing at your gate is landing on somebody else, on your wife, on a child in that house, on a body failing under the weight of it, then it has quit being private business, and the help you bring in is God reaching in rather than God being set aside. A doctor, if the drinking or the sleeping or a body that has quit running right sits anywhere near this. A counselor who hears the whole account and not the version that fits in a hallway. A pastor who will sit in a truck with you. And where the evenings have gone somewhere darker than regret, where staying has started to look like the harder of two options, dial 988 tonight instead of in the morning, or a crisis line nearer than that, and have somebody out here who can stand at this gate with you until it lifts. That is no failure of faith. That is the same God arriving in a vehicle, driven by a person who knows the way down a lane.