The Gate Is Not Mine To Open

He has driven the long way round again. It adds eleven minutes and he stopped pretending months ago that it has anything to do with the road.

The engine is off at the top gate. Same gate. His grandfather set that post by hand and the man who set it is under a stone in the churchyard two miles down, and the post is still true, and there is a padlock on the chain now that is not his padlock. Brass, and somebody sensible bought it.

Three months. The ewes went on a Tuesday morning in a lorry with a name on the side he had never heard of, and the whole thing took less than two hours, which is the part nobody understands when he tells it. Four generations came apart in the time it takes to do the school run and be home for the post.

The rain came through earlier and stopped, and the light is doing what it does on that slope in the late afternoon, low and sideways, catching the wet on the rushes. He knows where the water sits in that field after a week like this. There is a light on in the shed at the far end that comes on now by somebody else's timer, at somebody else's hour, and he sits and watches it come on.

His coat is still on the hook in the hall at home. There is a length of baler twine in the pocket and he has not taken it out, and he could not tell you why, and his wife has not asked.

At the mart three weeks ago a man he has known thirty years put a hand on his shoulder and said it kindly, meaning every word of it: you will come into abundance out of this. He gives it back to a man like you. Twice over.

He said thanks. He shook his hand. He sat in the car afterwards with his hands on the wheel for a while, because the trouble is not that the man was unkind. The man was not unkind. The trouble is that word. Everybody has that word now, and every single time he hears it what lands in him is money, and he has none of that either.

Maybe that is where you are. Somebody handed you a beautiful verse about ashes and you could not make it reach the ground under your boots. And if you came to a page with a name like this one half hoping the word meant a check, nobody here will make you feel small about it, because nobody who has lost something reaches for the sophisticated thing first.

Let me take the word apart before I offer you anything under it

I want to do the plain thing first, so that nothing after it is being sold to you.

Abundance is not the farm back. It is not a better holding down the road, it is not the flock standing on that hill again under your name, and it is not money, and I am not going to leave the word conveniently vague so it does quiet work on you while you read. On this page abundance means fullness of life, and that is not a smaller meaning reached for because the big one was unavailable. It is what the sentence actually carries.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.John 10:10

Read the noun. Life. Abundantly is not a second parcel with a farm inside it. It is a description of how much life: over the brim, more of it than there was, poured out rather than measured into a small cup.

You have that, and you have it this afternoon, in a stopped car at a gate you have no key to. I am not saying it because it is the encouraging thing to say. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and the Holy Spirit carries a line like that into a man with nothing to show for the year.

Three months, and I am not going to hurry you out of them

Nothing I have said fills that shed or hands you back four generations.

Three months is a particular distance and I would rather stand in it with you than step over it. It is when the phone has gone quiet again, when the people who were very good in the first fortnight have gone back to their own lambing, and when the body still has not caught up: it wakes at ten past five for stock that is not there. It is somebody else's diesel on your own lane.

And I am not going to explain the loss to you. There is no sentence that makes it sit right, and the ones people reach for are worse than the silence was: that it was needed, that time will make sense of it, that something is being arranged. I will not put one of those in your hands while a man is sitting on a wet road looking at a gate.

What I will say is that you were not left. Not on the Tuesday morning the lorry came up the lane, not in the office where the papers went across the desk, not once since. That is not my encouragement and it is not a feeling I am asking you to produce. It is what the Shepherd of Psalm 23 does with a sheep in a valley, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a line like that reach a man on a hillside three months later.

And here is the thing in that chapter that farming people see before anybody else. The Shepherd of John 10 does not stand at the gate waiting for the animal to make its own way back up to Him. He goes out to where it is, in the state it got into, on the ground it actually reached. That is not a picture added later to warm the chapter up. It is the shape of the whole thing.

So you are not outside anything. The fullness in that verse was never fitted to your acreage in the first place, it was fitted to you, and the written word puts it in the hands of a Shepherd who goes where the sheep is, and His Spirit has never once required the ground to be tidy before He filled a person standing on it.

What fullness looks like at the top gate

So what is it, then, if it is not the ground and not the money.

It is being able to feel things again. It is the return of ordinary tenderness: the afternoon you notice you laughed at the dog, a meal that tastes of something, sleep that comes before two. It is prayer that has stopped being a negotiation. It is the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all.

None of that is a consolation prize handed over because the real thing is unavailable, and you have not been fobbed off. Life was the headline in John 10 and the farm was scaffolding built around a life, and the merciful and terrible truth is that the life is still standing under it, and the Holy Spirit is filling it now, in a stopped car, three months in.

That is the definition and it does not move for anybody. Fullness describes life, and the life it describes is the one going on in your own chest this afternoon.

And you are not further from God than the man who still has his land. No line in Scripture measures a person's standing with Him in acres, and the Spirit given to you was not given on the strength of what you happened to be holding at the time.