Loved At The Gate You Drive Past

He takes the long way to the feed merchant now, and he still ends up at the top of the lane.

There is no reason to. There is a perfectly good road that misses it entirely. But the car goes up that hill the way it has gone up that hill for thirty years, and then he is at the gateway and he stops, because stopping is easier than driving past like a man with somewhere to be.

The padlock is new. It is a good one, galvanized, and it is not his. Somebody has put a proper hardcore track down to the yard, which is what he never got round to doing, and it looks well.

Fourteen months. The sheep went on a Tuesday morning in two lorries and it took under three hours, and he stood at the pens and helped load them, because a man does not stop being a stockman on the day he stops being a farmer. He has not been down the track since. He knows exactly what the shed his grandfather built looks like from the road and he has never once let himself look at it properly.

Fourteen months is a different country from six weeks. At six weeks there were people. Now there is nothing at all, and the neighbors are kind and busy, and nobody rings because there is nothing to ring about. He works three days a week at a builders merchant, he is good at it, and it is fine.

And here is the thing he cannot put down, sitting there with the engine running. He can trace it. He can name the winter he borrowed against the ground instead of selling the top field. He can name the year he did not go to the meeting. He can name the exact conversation with his son that he handled badly and never repaired. Some of it was weather and prices and the way the whole trade went, and some of it was him, and he is not a man who can pretend otherwise.

His wife tells him God has forgiven him and she means it and she is right. He says yes. But at the top of that lane, with the new padlock in front of him, what he actually believes is that God is being polite about it the way a bank manager is polite, and that somewhere there is a file with his name across the top and the whole of it written down inside.

Maybe that is where you are. Not needing to be told the loss was not your fault. Needing to know what God actually thinks of you now that some of it was.

Say what the word means before offering anybody anything

I want the word nailed down before a single thing is offered underneath it, because on a page with a name like this one it does quiet work if nobody stops it.

Abundance is not money and it is not acres. It is not the ground back, it is not the flock back, and it is not a better holding somewhere else with a longer track. The word means fullness of life. That is what John 10 says it is: a Shepherd came so that His own would have life and have it over the brim, and the noun in the sentence is life and it never was anything else.

So nothing here is a payout and nothing here is a scheme for getting land back. What is being talked about is what a man actually has, at the top of a lane, in a stopped car.

You are loved this morning, at that gateway, with the engine running and the new padlock in front of you, and it is not a love that has been quietly adjusted downward since the sale. That is not a nice thing to say to a farmer. It is what Scripture says in Lamentations 3, written by a man sitting in front of an actual ruin, that His mercies are new every morning and His faithfulness is great, and the Holy Spirit takes a line like that off a page and puts it into a man who can name his own part in the whole business.

The part that was yours

Now here is what I am not going to do, and I want to say it plainly, because it decides whether anything else can be heard.

I am not going through it with you. I am not asking which decisions were which, or sorting the weather from the borrowing, or handing anybody a percentage. And I am not doing the opposite thing either, which is to say brightly that none of it was yours, because you know better than that, and a comfort built on a lie will not hold weight the next time that car stops at the gate.

Mercy does not need the file opened. That is the whole scandal of it. When the father in Luke 15 comes down the road, the son has a prepared speech with the itemized list in it, and he never gets to finish saying it, and the father is not being sentimental about the boy. He simply does not require the accounting before the arms go round him.

You have been met without an audit. Not excused and not investigated. Met. That is what the word of God puts in a story Jesus told about a father who ran, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that story stop being a nice picture on a wall and start being about a specific man in a specific car.

What He is not holding

There is a picture a great many of us carry without ever saying it out loud, and it is of God being professionally polite. Correct with us. Forgiving the way an institution forgives, with the record kept somewhere in the back.

Scripture will not have it. It says He removes our transgressions as far as the east is from the west, and that distance was chosen precisely because it never closes. It says He casts them into the depths of the sea. It says love keeps no record of wrongs, and it says that about the love which comes from Him and describes Him best of all.

You were loved on the Tuesday morning the lorries came, standing at the pens doing the last decent thing that could be done for those animals, and you were loved by a God who was not stood off at a distance assessing how it had come to this. That is what the word of God says about His steadfast love, and His Spirit is the one carrying it fourteen months up a hill to a man who has not let himself look at the shed.

Fullness on three days a week at a builders merchant

So what does fullness of life mean for a man whose life had ground in it and does not any more.

It means being able to be with his wife in the evening instead of merely sitting in the same room as her. It means sleeping through. It means being able to make the phone call to his son. It means the return of ordinary pleasure in ordinary things: a hedge laid well, a decent cup of tea, a job done properly at a trade counter for somebody who needed help finding it. It means prayer that has stopped being an application.

None of that is a substitute for the land and I am not offering it as one. The land is gone, the loss is real, and nothing on this page tidies it away. But the life underneath the land is still standing, and God is filling it, and He started before anybody asked Him to.

You have His kindness this morning as a settled fact rather than as a thing to be earned back, because Lamentations 3 hands it to a man in rubble instead of to a man with a plan, and His Spirit is the one who makes a settled fact land in a chest that has been braced for fourteen months.