The Sentence You Carried Up the Hill

The seedlings come up the track forty at a time in a wheelbarrow, and the man pushing it is telling everybody about his knee. Fourteen people on a wet slope behind the school. A bucket of slow release pellets, two spades, and a crowbar for the stony end where the clay goes to rock. This is the third winter since the slip came down and took the fence and half the track, and today the hill is finally being given something back.

One woman is on her knees in the clay and she has stopped. Not resting. Stopped. She has a flax seedling in her left hand, roots out, and her right hand flat in the mud, and she has been like that long enough that the man beside her has offered her the crowbar twice.

What stopped her is a sentence. It arrived nineteen days ago while she was rinsing a bucket under the outside tap. Nothing devotional about it, no music, no candle. It was four words long, and it named a person and a thing to do. She would not call it a voice, and she has been careful about that even inside her own head. It was more that the sentence was already standing there and she walked into it.

She has done nothing about it. Not for want of wanting to. She cannot get past the first question, and the first question is not what do I do. The first question is was that You. Nineteen days of picking it up, turning it over, setting it back down, and going to bed.

And you know this hill, even if you have never knelt on one. You know the particular weight of a thing you cannot name and cannot put down, and how it gets heavier by being carried and not lighter. You have a sentence of your own. You have brought it to every ordinary place you have been since it came, and it is still in your hands, and your hands have stopped.

The weight of it was never the proof

Let me say the first thing plainly, because you've been graded quite enough these past weeks, mostly by yourself.

You did not stop because you're careless. You stopped because you're careful, and you're careful because you take Him seriously. Nobody freezes over a word they do not believe could be from God. The stillness in your hands is not evidence against your faith. It is made out of your faith.

But the sentence was never the whole trouble. The trouble is what nineteen days did to everything else. Somewhere around the fourth day you quietly stopped bringing Him things, not in a decision you could point to, but because everything now arrives unlabelled and you would rather not be handed another one you cannot read. The uncertainty about one sentence became a caution about the whole conversation, and that is the real injury here.

And underneath it sits the thing you've not said out loud. You're not actually afraid of getting it wrong. You're afraid of getting it wrong in front of Him, and of some disappointment settling over you that you will never quite be able to lift. That is a picture of God you're carrying, and it is not His face. It is a face somebody handed you somewhere, and it has been standing between you and the tap in your own yard for nineteen days.

The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek will he teach his way.Psalm 25:9

You are exactly the sort of person that verse names, because meekness is what asking looks like from the outside. That is what the word says and not a kindness I am extending, and the Holy Spirit is the One who guides somebody with open hands.

Read what that puts on Him and what it puts on you. Guiding is His verb. Teaching is His verb. Both are things done to somebody, by Someone else, and neither is a skill you were supposed to have arrived with. And look at the condition, because it is not sharpness and it is not seniority. It is meekness, which is simply what a person looks like when they are asking rather than announcing. Which is precisely what you've been doing on your knees in that clay for nineteen days while you thought you were failing.

You've been meeting the condition the entire time you believed yourself to be the problem.

So here is what is settled, and I mean to hand you ground and not a test. A test gives you a result. Ground does not tell you where to go. It holds you while you walk.

The first settled thing is what God has already said out loud. Not what He might be saying to you privately this month. What He has already said, in the open, over His own name, to everybody, and left in writing where anybody can hold it. It does not move, and it is not sensitive to how tired you're or how strongly a thing landed. Anything that contradicts it is not Him, however it arrived and however heavily it came down. Weight is not a credential. How hard a thing hit you tells you something about how you received it, and nothing whatever about where it came from.

The second settled thing is what Christ is like. You've four accounts of Him, and He is consistent all the way through them: He does not humiliate, He does not trap, He does not speak in riddles to people who are genuinely asking, He is unbearably patient with slow learners and hard on nobody except the ones crushing others. That character is a thing you can hold a sentence up against.

And now the part that dissolves half of this in one go.

A great many of the things that come to a person are things He has already commanded, out loud, to everyone. Go and be reconciled. Go and see the one that nobody is visiting. Say the true thing gently. Give back what is not yours. Those do not need a verdict on their authorship before your hands are allowed to move, because they were published long ago and you're included in the everyone. If the sentence you've been holding agrees with what He has already said and looks like Jesus, you can do it today. Not because you've decided it was Him. Because the thing itself is already His, and it was already yours to do.

That is not a technique. It is noticing that half your list was never actually in question.

And the rest of it, some of it you will not be able to weigh. I am not going to hand you a way of holding a thing up to the light that returns an answer, because it does not exist, and a person who gives you one has given you something that will break in your hands on the day it matters most. You may never find out about that one sentence. Not knowing is not distance. It is not a fault in your hearing and it is not Him going quiet on you.

Because here is what He is doing while you cannot tell.

A rudder does nothing at anchor. It is a good rudder, correctly fitted, attached to a Captain who knows the water, and it does nothing at all until the boat is moving and the water is going past it. He steers people who are walking. He is not a father who hands a child a map at the top of a track and stands back to see whether they can read it. He goes down the track with them and corrects the direction as they go, and correcting a direction is a thing that can only be done to somebody who has one.

So the confidence you've been trying to build is not confidence that you've read it right. It is confidence in the One doing the steering. That is a far smaller thing to carry, and it is in your hand today.

You have the guiding placed on Him rather than on your accuracy, and it was written that way from the start. Psalm 25:9 makes both the guiding and the teaching His verbs, and the Holy Spirit is doing them in a person on their knees in the clay.