Nine Years of Mud

The cloud comes down on the ridge most mornings and sits there until about ten, so the whole valley goes the color of wet stone and you work inside it, and the only sound is water finding its way down through four terraces and the noise your own boot makes coming out of the mud.

He has been at it nine years.

His cousin came up from the city on a Saturday with her husband, who is a good man and did not know what to do with his hands. They stood at the gate by the road and looked down over the patch, and she said, so what have you got to show for it.

She was not being unkind. She could not see anything. From the gate by the road it is mud, and a lot of stones, and some green at the edges that could be anything, and a man in his forties standing in water up to his shins.

Here is what he could have told her, if there were a way to say it that did not sound like a defense.

He knows where every stone in those walls went. He can name the year each of the four terraces got its wall back, and the two winters that took one back out again. He cleared the channel of roots the first three years and did nothing else, and nothing you take out of a patch has ever shown up in a photograph. The water leaves at the right end now. It used to pool at the top and go sour and rot the roots off everything he put in, and now it moves, and moving water in the right channel is nine years of work that looks exactly like a ditch.

He knows the cane grass came back twice and the third time it came back thinner.

What he said was, not much yet.

And then they had lunch and it was a good afternoon and nobody meant any harm by any of it.

But he stood at that gate again on Monday morning, on his own, before the cloud lifted. And for about ninety seconds he saw the whole thing the way she saw it, which is the thing he cannot afford and cannot always help.

You have your own patch. It might be nine years of counseling, or nine years of a marriage being put back together in a way nobody at the table can see, or nine years without a drink, or nine years of a body that gets a little further before it stops. And you have the visitor at the gate, and the question, and the ninety seconds on Monday morning when you look at it with their eyes.

You are standing on something God laid and not on the progress anybody can see from the road. Isaiah 28:16 says He lays a tried stone for a sure foundation, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been down at a depth in you that no visitor has ever been given a view of.

The part of the building nobody photographs

Read what God actually points at when He says look.

Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD, Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.Isaiah 28:16

Behold, He says. Look at this. And then He points at something that is going into the ground.

A cornerstone is set below the line where anybody's eye starts. It is the piece the whole building is squared off, and once the walls are up nobody will ever see it again, and no one has ever taken a photograph of one. God chose that image on purpose and the context tells you why. Isaiah is talking to men who had made a fast arrangement, a quick covenant they thought would carry them, and God's answer to a room full of haste is a stone going into the dirt.

Then the last clause, which is the one that has been mistranslated at you your whole life. He that believeth shall not make haste. That is not an instruction to slow down. It is a description of what a man stops doing once there is something under him. Haste in that verse is scrambling, the frantic sideways motion of somebody with no floor. A man who is not making haste is not a man going slower on purpose. He is a man who has quit scrambling because a stone was laid.

You have quit scrambling because there is a stone under you, and that is what the word calls believing. Isaiah 28:16 puts not making haste and believing in the same clause, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one holding a man steady in the ninety seconds at the gate on Monday morning.

Slow is not stalled, and I am not promising you fast

Now the three things I am not going to do to you.

I am not going to tell you this speeds up. Nothing on this page has permission to say that, and everybody who has said it to you was reaching for something to give you.

I am not going to suggest you could have gone faster. The growth of a thing is not a productivity problem. A man who pulls on a plant to help it along has done damage, and the fact that he was trying hard is the reason the damage happened.

And I am not going to tell you that seeing nothing means nothing is happening. But hear the shape of what I am saying, because it is careful. I am not promising you a harvest and I never will. What I am telling you is that I cannot see it and it is not there are two different sentences, and only one of them is something you are actually in a position to check. Roots work at a depth where nobody has ever had a look, including you, including the visitor at your gate, including the people who love you and want you further along than you are.

You were never given the job of proving to anybody that the ground is working. Mark 4:27 has a man who sleeps and rises night and day while the seed springs up and grows, and the word says plainly that he knoweth not how, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the part underneath that nobody has ever been shown.

And what is being rebuilt is not what was there. The wall he has put back is not the wall his grandfather walked past. It is a new wall on an old line, every stone chosen and set by a different pair of hands, and it will hold, and it is not the same wall. Restoring ground does not hand you back the ground. It puts the ground back into use. You are having yourself put back into use and not being reissued as who you were at thirty. Ephesians 4:23 says be renewed in the spirit of your mind, and renewing is a slow verb in every language it has ever been written in, and it is the Holy Spirit doing it at His own pace inside a man who mostly cannot feel it happening.