Other People's Fences

He is setting a corner on the Kelso place, which is eleven miles from the place that used to be his and on the wrong side of the highway from it.

It is a good corner. He sets an H brace the way his grandfather set them, post and post and a horizontal between, and then the diagonal wire doubled and twitched tight with a stick until the whole thing sings when you flick it. Nobody will ever see it. In two months there will be wire on it and grass up around it and it will look like every other corner in the county. He does it right anyway. He has never in his life set one any other way.

He has a one man outfit now. A flatbed, a post driver he bought used, a dog that rides in the cab and thinks she is helping. The Kelso place. The Wynne place. The church camp on the county line that had a mile of fence go down in a storm and no money to speak of, which he did over four Saturdays and never sent a bill for. Four counties know his work. If you say the word fence at the feed store somebody says his name inside a minute.

There is a boy on the Wynne place, sixteen, who follows him up the line asking questions. Why doubled and not single. Why that side of the post. Why you dig that deep when the ground is like this. He answers all of it. He has taught that kid to splice, to read a line, to walk a fence in March and know what winter did to it. Two weeks ago the boy set a whole corner by himself and stood back from it, and the look on that kid's face is a thing worth seeing.

And if you asked the man what he does, he would say: I do fence for people. Just fill in work. Not my land.

That is the whole tally he keeps. On one side, the place he lost, which is eleven miles away and has somebody else's name on the mailbox. On the other side, everything he has done since, in a column marked does not count.

He drives past his own place about once a month, not on purpose, and he looks at the fence along the road, which he built at twenty-six, and it is still standing straight because he built it right.

You have your own version and you know the column it is written in. Something you lost, on one side. And on the other side, all of it, everything that has actually shown up since: the work, the people, the thing you are good at, the ones who ask you questions, the room where you are the steady one. And you have decided it does not count, because it is not yours, or not the same, or not what you asked for. You are already doing the work, and you have been filing it under nothing. Amos 7:15 says out loud in the written word that God takes a man while he is in the middle of ordinary work and sends him out with what is already in his hands, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been out on those fence lines with you the whole time you were telling yourself it was fill in.

He took a herdman off a hillside

Here is the line. It is short and it is easy to read past.

And the LORD took me as I followed the flock, and the LORD said unto me, Go, prophesy unto my people Israel.Amos 7:15

Amos was not in a school for this. He says so a verse earlier. He was a herdman and he worked sycomore fruit, and when the professional at the shrine tried to run him out of town, that is the only credential he claimed. He did not say I was called out of the wilderness in a blaze. He said the Lord took me as I followed the flock.

As I followed. Not before. Not after, in some clean season when the sheep were sold and the calendar was empty. In the middle of the following, with the dog out on the left and the day half gone and nothing at all remarkable about the afternoon.

You were taken while you were following, and the taking was God's own doing and not an accident of your circumstances. That is what Amos 7:15 puts in writing, that the Lord took him, and the same Spirit who moved a herdman off a hillside and made him one of the great voices of the Old Testament is the Spirit at work on a man in a borrowed field with a twitch stick in his hand.

And notice what the verse does not say, because this is where a preacher usually gets careless and I am not going to be. It does not say prophesying was better than herding. Amos never says that. He does not compare the two and he does not thank God for the loss of the one. He tells you what happened and who did it. That is all, and it is enough, and you are allowed to be that plain about your own life.

What arriving does and does not mean

Restoration arriving does not mean it arrives in the shape you lost.

That is the sentence a lot of people cannot get comfortable with, and I would rather be uncomfortable and honest with you than comfortable and useless. Restored and replaced are two entirely different words. Replaced means the same thing shows up again with a new date on it. Restored means God goes to work on the person, and what He puts in that person's hands is real, and it does not have to match the old thing to be real.

The Kelso place is not his place. It never will be. There is no arrangement, no sale, no turn of events in which the corner he set on the Kelso place becomes the corner he set at twenty-six on his own road. He can grieve that. He should. He can drive past his own fence line once a month for the rest of his life with something going tight in his chest, and nothing in this article is asking him to stop.

You are being restored in a shape you did not order, and it does not have to match in order to be real. His word puts a herdman on a road he did not pick and calls it the Lord's own doing, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work in a person rather than in the property, which is the whole reason it can go on happening on ground that is not yours.

And hear the other half, because a page that only said the first half would be cruel. You have every right to keep the grief about your own place open and still call this real. It is written that God is near the brokenhearted and He never once required a person to close an old account before He would start a new work, and it is the same Spirit doing both, in the same man, on the same afternoon.