Nine Seasons at the Fence Line

The fence line runs east off the Bethel Road for a quarter mile of good cedar posts, and then, where the corner ought to be, it quits. Forty feet of nothing. Then it picks up on the far side and runs on down to the creek like the gap was somebody else's business.

That gap is where the barn closed the corner. The barn was the fourth side of that field for sixty-one years, and the wire was stapled straight into its west wall, and now the wire runs out into air and stops. Every August, Ray walks the line to check staples, and every August he gets to the gap and stands in it a while before he goes on.

The fire came up out of the draw on a Tuesday afternoon in August with the wind out of the southwest. The grass was cured to paper. The barn went in about eleven minutes, and the sound the roof made when it let go is a sound he has never described to anybody, because there is no word for it.

Nine cutting seasons since. He counts in hay, because that is how a man counts on that ground. Nine first cuttings and nine seconds, every bale of it hauled eleven miles to a leased shed on the Fairchild place, because he had nowhere on his own dirt to put a bale. Four of those years went to what came after the fire instead of the fire: the adjuster, the survey, the letter, the second letter, the whole winter the file sat in the kitchen drawer because he could not make himself open the drawer.

His wife stopped asking about the barn in the third year. His son learned to back a trailer in a leased yard he had no feeling for. There is a photograph on the hall wall of Ray's father standing in that doorway in a snap button shirt with his thumbs hooked in his pockets, and the doorway in the photograph is a doorway that does not exist anywhere on the earth now.

People have been kind. Kind and wrong, usually inside the same sentence. You will build a better one. That old barn was on its last legs anyway. A man at the co-op told him the settlement was probably a blessing in disguise, and Ray thanked him for it, and walked out to the truck, and sat with both hands on the wheel in the parking lot for longer than he would admit to anybody.

Because here is the thing nobody at the co-op is tracking. He does not want a better barn. He wants the nine seasons. He wants his son backing a trailer in his own yard, and his wife asking about it at supper, and his father's doorway standing where a doorway is supposed to stand.

You have a fence line of your own and a gap in it. It may not be a barn. It may be a marriage, or a business, or a body, or a stretch of years an illness or somebody else's decisions took out of the middle of your life, and you know the month it happened and you know which way the wind was blowing. You have heard the co-op sentence in one of its versions, and you thanked the person for it, and you went and sat in your truck. You are standing in a real gap, and God has never once looked at it and called it nothing. Isaiah 58:12 hands a job title to the people who stand in gaps like yours, a name set down in the written word and not invented by a man at a counter, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that word in the prophet's mouth and who is standing in the forty feet alongside you while you do your counting.

The verse has a job title in it

Let me read you the line, because it is the ground everything else here stands on.

And they that shall be of thee shall build the old waste places: thou shalt raise up the foundations of many generations; and thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach, The restorer of paths to dwell in.Isaiah 58:12

Read what God does before He says one word about repair. He calls it a waste place. He does not say it was never much of a place. He says raise up the foundations, which is a thing you only say about a foundation that is down. And the word breach is a builder's word before it is a preacher's word. A breach is a gap in a wall where a wall is supposed to be. It has edges. It has a width. You can measure a breach, and God is looking straight at your forty feet and calling it by its right name.

That is worth more than it sounds like. Most of the kindness that arrives after a loss works by shrinking the loss. It was not that good a barn. It was time, the place was too much for you anyhow. Every one of those sentences is a quiet argument that the gap is not really a gap, and it leaves you standing in a hole the whole county has agreed to call level ground. God will not do that to you. He measures first.

You have a name in Isaiah 58:12 that no adjuster and no neighbor at the counter can issue to you or take back off you. Repairer of the breach. Restorer of paths to dwell in. That is written, and it was written over people whose walls were down at the time, and the same Spirit who moved on Isaiah to say it is the Spirit at work in you this morning while the gap is still exactly forty feet wide.

You were measured honestly by God before anybody offered to comfort you. He promised nothing about your loss before He named it, and that order is not an accident, because a comfort laid over an unmeasured hole is a floor made of paper. It is the Holy Spirit who holds a person in that first honest look without letting it swallow them.

Restored and replaced are two different trades

Anybody who has worked with their hands knows this and just does not always have the words for it.

Replacement is a swap. You get a new thing, you set it where the old thing was, and it is finished the day it is delivered. Restoration is not a swap at all. Restoration is work done on the thing that took the damage, or on the person the damage was done to. Different trade, different tools, different length of time.

So look at what God actually says He restores. In Joel 2:25 the promise is, "I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten." Not the barn. The years, and the person the years were taken out of. He says it about time, which is the one thing on the property nobody has ever written a check for.

If somebody puts up a new barn in that corner, it is a good barn and a real kindness and it is not the barn. Ray's father never stood in its doorway. It has no sixty-one years in it, and it never will, and a man is allowed to say that out loud without being ungrateful. Restored is not the same word as replaced, and any voice that runs the two together is asking you to agree that nine seasons of your life were interchangeable with something. They were not.

You are the thing being restored here, and the word says it plainly enough that nobody needs to soften it for you. Isaiah 58:12 does not promise you the same building. It promises that the waste places get built and the paths get restored to dwell in, and that the person standing in the breach gets a name, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing that work in you at a pace He sets and does not explain.