Ninth Summer, Same Crack

The towel he kneels on is the blue one nobody is allowed to use in the house anymore, and it has a rust mark on it shaped like a trowel.

July, seven in the evening, the heat finally coming off the day. He is down at the foot of the low wall at the back of the yard, in the eighteen inches of gravel between the wall and the grass, with his knees on the towel and a hand trowel he is not really using. The neighbor's sprinkler is doing its slow tick two yards over. The hose is coiled by the spigot where it has been since May.

And there is the weed. Same crack. Base of the wall, third course up from the ground, where the mortar has gone soft and sandy and comes away between his fingers like brown sugar.

He knows this weed. He has pulled it every summer since they moved in. He has poured boiling water down that crack. He bought the spray, the good one, the expensive one, and did it twice in one season because the bottle said he could. One year he mixed a little cement in a yogurt container and packed the crack full, and felt genuinely pleased with himself, and by the following June there was a green thread coming out of the seam beside it, half an inch to the left.

Ninth summer. He is forty six now.

And kneeling there, with the sprinkler ticking and a mosquito at his ear, he is not really thinking about the weed at all.

He is thinking about the thing in him that has been there longer than the wall has. Twenty years, near enough, and he could tell you its name in one word if there were anybody to tell. He has prayed about it in every posture a man can adopt. He has fasted about it. He has had two seasons where it went quiet and he genuinely believed that was that, and both times it came back, half an inch to the left, in a seam he had not thought to look at.

He has read the books. He has done the thing where you find the earliest memory. He has told God he is sorry so many times that the words have gone smooth.

And the arithmetic that sits in a man on his knees on a blue towel is this: if twenty years of everything I know how to do has not moved it, what exactly is left.

Maybe you have your own crack. Maybe yours is not a wall, and maybe you have never said it out loud to a living person, and there is no reason today has to be the day you do. But you know the seam it comes through, and you know the sound of the ninth summer, and that is enough for us to start.

Everything he pulled was already the finished part

Here is the first thing, and it is not a rebuke, it is a relief.

Every single thing that man has done for nine summers was done to the part of the plant that was already above ground. The green thread in the seam is not the plant. It is the plant's report. It is what a thing does when it is finished growing in the dark and has nothing left to do but come out where somebody can see it.

Which means the boiling water and the good spray and the cement were not stupid. They were aimed at the outcome, and the outcome is the one part of the arrangement that was never in charge of anything.

You have been working faithfully on the visible half for twenty years, and the fact that it has not moved is not a verdict on how hard you worked. Psalm 51 is a man's prayer about exactly this, and it does not go after behavior at all; it goes underneath, and the Spirit is the only one in this yard who can get under a wall without taking it down first.

That is not a reason to stop pulling. Pull the weed. Behavior matters, and the people around you live with the visible half. But nobody has ever changed the underground by getting better at the aboveground, and nine summers of evidence is worth more than nine summers of self blame.

You are not lazy and you were never the one who failed to reach it. The written word says the inward parts belong to God's territory and not to ours, and it is His Spirit who works there, which is precisely why your hands have come back empty every June.

Truth in the inward parts, and who gets to hear it

Read what the psalm actually asks for, because the request is stranger than we remember.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.Psalm 51:6

Note where God's interest lies. Not in the crack. In the inward parts, the hidden part, the place under the footing, the place the owner of the wall cannot get to with a trowel.

And note that this is not God demanding a confession in front of people. The psalm is a man alone with God about the hidden part. Nothing in it requires him to tell the elders, or his wife, or a group in a church basement. Some people find that telling one safe human being lifts a weight, and if that is you, good, do it. But nothing in this article asks it of you, and nothing in that verse does either. The hidden part is between you and God tonight if that is where you want it kept.

You have permission to bring the thing to God exactly as it is, without a presentation and without a name for it that would satisfy anybody else. His word says He desires truth down there, which means He is not squeamish about what is down there, and the same Spirit who searches the deep things is not going to flinch at the seam in your wall.

There is also no key here. There is no missing piece, no unrepented thing you have overlooked, no formula you would have found by now if you were serious. That kind of talk turns a hurting man into an archaeologist of his own soul, digging for the one shard that unlocks it, and the digging becomes the new weed. God is not withholding the answer pending a better search.

What is underneath is a medical question too

Say this plainly, because a man on his knees at the foot of a wall deserves plain.

Some of what sits under a twenty year pattern is not spiritual at all, or not only spiritual. Sleep, pain, alcohol, a thyroid, a grief nobody ever helped you carry, something that happened to you young that you have never once called by its real name. So put it in front of a doctor, because a body is a physical fact and never a character flaw. Put it in front of a counselor too, since no man surveys his own footings from inside the house, and someone trained will walk the perimeter with him. A person brought in here is one of God's own instruments and not a stand in for Him, and asking for one has never been the evening praying failed. And when the hour after supper has gone somewhere past regret, when ending it has begun to feel like relief, 988 answers by call and by text tonight, and a crisis line nearer than that will answer too: use one of them, and have somebody close enough to sit down on the gravel beside you.

You are not kneeling at this wall alone, and you were not alone through any of those nine summers, including the ones you told nobody about. Scripture calls God near to the brokenhearted, and Jesus put the name Helper on His Spirit, which He wears as a trade and not as a courtesy; help arriving in the shape of a person is still help arriving from Him.