The frost is still on the top wire when he starts the west line.
He goes on foot because the truck cannot get down the draw, and because he has walked this line every spring since he bought the place. Fence pliers in his back pocket. A coil of smooth wire over one shoulder. A staple pouch on his belt that his father wore before him and that has never once been full.
Ninth spring. He counts as he goes, out loud and under his breath at the same time. Post twelve is sound. Post thirteen has heaved up out of the ground the way they do when the frost gets under them, so he tamps it and moves on. The wire at the creek crossing is slack again, and his hands know that motion so well that his mind runs free the whole time, and that is the trouble.
Because his mind counts something else while his hands work.
The way he spoke to his wife on Tuesday. The thing he said about his brother at the sale barn in front of four other men. The hour he lost last week on his phone that he cannot account for and would not want to. He counts them the way he counts posts, west to east, and the number does not go down from spring to spring. If anything it runs longer this year, because he is honest, and honesty adds line items.
The sun comes up behind him and lays his own shadow out ahead of him down the row, long and thin and moving when he moves.
By the corner he is doing arithmetic on himself. Nine years of walking this line. Nine years of reading his Bible in the truck cab with the heater running. Nine years of meaning every word of it. And he could not tell a soul at the feed store this afternoon what is different about the man on this fence and the man who walked it the first spring.
He stops at the corner post. There is a hawk on the far end of the row and the whole east pasture is filling up with light, and he sees none of it, because his eyes are down on his boots doing sums.
And you know that walk. Yours has no fence in it. Yours is a hallway at eleven at night, or the drive home from work with the radio off, or the ten minutes before anybody else in the house is awake. Same pliers. Same count. Nine springs, or twenty, and the number never goes down.
Nobody ever fixed a fence by counting it
A man can count a fence line for nine springs and never once repair it by counting. The count tells him where the trouble sits. That is the whole of what a count can do, and then it is finished and it starts over next spring at post one.
I have watched good men do this to themselves for thirty years, and I will tell you what the counting produces. It produces an expert. There is nobody alive who knows your leaning posts the way you know them, and you could recite the whole list in order without missing an item.
Scripture never once hands a believer an inventory and tells him to work out his own total, and the Spirit who searches a man does it to comfort him rather than to tally him. You have nine springs of honest walking behind you, and the count in your head was never the ledger God keeps.
Now here is the sentence this whole shelf stands on, and it is short, and it does not ask for a count of anything.
Seek the LORD, and his strength: seek his face evermore.Psalm 105:4
Face. Not tally. The verb in that line points away from the man doing it, which is exactly backwards from the way a careful man handles a problem, and it is the reason careful men stay stuck the longest.
You are being changed on the walk you are already taking, and the changing is not the arithmetic you do while you walk. Psalm 105 puts the seeking on His face and never once on a personal inventory, and the Holy Spirit does the altering in a man while that man's eyes are somewhere else entirely. I am not laying encouragement over your count like a fresh coat of paint. The written word moved the eyes first. Everything after that follows the eyes.
And the tiredness in it is honest tiredness. Nine springs of walking is a real nine springs, and there is nobody standing at the corner post with a clipboard taking down numbers. Not God. Not me. Not the man you imagine would be disappointed if he had the whole file.
The light was on the east pasture the whole time
Let me say plainly what this looking is not, because a man built like that one will turn it into a chore inside of a week.
It is not a skill. There is no correct posture for it, no minimum count of minutes, no state a man has to reach first. The moment looking at Christ becomes another item on the walk, the item goes into the list, and the list is what we were getting out from under.
A hawk on a corner post does not concentrate on a sunrise. It sits where the light is coming and the light does the rest, and by full morning that bird is warm through and did not earn one degree of it.
The Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in the middle of an ordinary morning, and He does it without waiting for a man to feel something first. You have everything the looking requires, and it is not your focus and it is not your best hour. Hebrews 12:2 says to look to Jesus, the author and the finisher, which settles who started this work and who is finishing it, and it hands a worn out man the one motion a worn out man can still make.
That is the mercy sitting inside the mechanism. A man who is used up can still lift his head. So can a woman who has broken every promise she made herself since January. Lifting the head is the one thing the weakest person on the place can do, which is very likely why God chose it.
When the count is landing on somebody else
Some of what a man carries on that walk is only his own. Some of it is not. Some of it goes home ahead of him and sits down at the table before he gets there, and the people in that house have learned the sound of the truck door.
You have a God who moves toward a house like that one, and He moves through people with faces and phone numbers. The written word puts the Comforter inside a believer and then sets believers down next to each other on purpose, and the Holy Spirit works through a neighbor at a kitchen table as readily as He works through a quiet hour alone.
If that is the shape of yours, hear this next part the way I would say it on your porch. Walking this line with another man on it is not a step down from faith. It is one of the tools God has always worked with, the same as He works with weather and years. A doctor, if the body or the sleep or the drinking is anywhere in this, because a man running empty counts his own faults double and never notices he is doing it. A counselor, one who takes the whole account rather than the version that makes a rancher sound reasonable. A pastor, or a friend who will not flinch at any of it. And if the last stretch of nights has run somewhere past regret, if the place has started looking like it would be easier on everybody with you off it, call 988 before you walk back out to the west line, and ask one man to drive over and stay a while.
They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.Psalm 34:5
You have had somebody on the inside of this line every spring you walked the outside of it, all nine. That is the written word's own account of what happens to a face that comes up, and the Spirit who moved the man who wrote it has been out on the west line beside you since long before you noticed anybody was there. Your shadow is not the only one on that row this morning.
So set the pliers down in the grass. Not forever, and not because work is a sin. Set them down because both hands are full and something is being held out at that corner post.
This is yours right now, at post one, with every leaning post in the row still leaning. Psalm 105 promised the strength to any man who seeks His face, and His Spirit is the one carrying the changing along, so not one part of it waits on a better version of a man showing up first. Lift your face. The hawk did not earn the morning.
Nine springs of arithmetic was not wasted, understand. It told the truth and the man did not run from it, and there are people who never get that far. But a count is a map, and a map has never moved a fence one inch. What moves a man is a face he keeps looking at.
You are already the man being changed on this walk, and today's degree of it is not a payment you have fallen behind on. It is written that the One who began a good work is the One carrying it through, and His Spirit does that carrying whether the morning feels like anything or not. Walk your line. Look up the whole row.
Declare this over yourself
Say these at the corner post, or in the truck cab, at a volume somebody standing beside you could hear. 2 Corinthians 5 puts the word ambassador on a man who belongs to Christ, and an ambassador never speaks on his own account. The authority was handed down to him, and it does not rise in a good season or drop off in a bad one. Every one of these three is bolted to a written line, and lifting a sentence off a page into cold air over a fence is what the Holy Spirit does, so first light finds a rough voice carrying it every bit as far as a strong one. When that line changes, and how much of it moves this spring, runs on His timing and not on the man walking it.
- Fence line, you are cedar and wire and nine springs of frost, and you were never the measure of the man walking you. Psalm 105 says to seek His face and never once says to seek a tally, so my chin is up this morning and my eyes are off my own boots for the first time in nine years.
- Fear that I am the one man God started and set down, you go. Your lease on this fence line runs out at this corner post, in the name of Jesus. Philippians 1 puts the beginning of this work and the carrying of it in the same pair of hands, and they are not mine, and His Spirit has been changing a man through nine springs he could not see one inch of.
- Lord, my count is left at the gate and my eyes stay up on You the whole length of the west line. Psalm 105 says a man who seeks Your face comes away carrying Your strength, and Your Spirit has been working nine springs deep, down where no frost ever reached and no arithmetic of mine ever went.
Psalm 105:4
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