Asking for the Hill Country

It was said kindly, over a table, in front of eleven people, by somebody who loves him.

Perhaps it is time you let the younger ones take it on.

Nobody argued with it. Two people made a small approving noise, which is the part he keeps returning to. His nephew, who is thirty four and good, said something about how he would need help anyway, which was generous and was also an acceptance of the premise.

And he said something light, and the conversation moved, and that was eight days ago.

He is seventy three. The thing in question is not enormous. It is a piece of work he has done for nineteen years, and it takes about two days a month, and about six people depend on it, and he is better at it than anybody else who has ever done it because he has done it for nineteen years.

He is not ill. His hands are fine. He drove four hours last month without thinking about it.

And he has not answered the sentence, and he is not going to be asked again, because that is how those sentences work: they are said once, kindly, and then everybody waits, and if you say nothing you have agreed.

He has spent eight days working out what he actually feels, which is a thing that takes longer at seventy three than it did at forty. And here is the closest he has got.

He does not mind handing it over. He minds having been told it is time, by somebody who has not had to do it, at a table, with a noise of agreement.

The courtyard at this hour is full of the last of the light and there is a vine over the table and the plates are still down the middle from Sunday, and he is sitting in it on his own with a cold cup.

There is a man in Joshua who is eighty five, and everybody knows the verse, and almost nobody notices what he asks for.

Give me this mountain

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally promises. Hold on and God will give you something great. Your best years are ahead. I am not going to say that. Nobody talking to you about God has been authorized to promise a late triumph, and a man of seventy three who is handed a forecast will measure the rest of his life against it.

Caleb comes to Joshua at eighty five, and here is how he puts it: As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in (Joshua 14:11).

And then, having said that, he asks for something, and this is the part worth noticing. He does not ask for a quiet portion. He does not ask for good ground near water. He asks for the hill country, and he says so knowing exactly what is on it, because he names the fortified cities and the giants in the same breath (Joshua 14:12).

Eighty five years old, and he asks for the hardest ground on the map.

You have not been retired by anybody with the authority to do it. That is not me overreading the passage; Joshua 14:11 has Caleb stating his own strength and Joshua 14:13 has Joshua blessing him and giving him what he asked for, and the Holy Spirit who preserved that exchange recorded no objection from anybody in the room.

And notice what Caleb is not doing. He is not defending himself against being pushed aside; nobody in the text has told him to step back. He is asking. It is an initiative rather than a defense, and that is a different posture entirely from the one a man takes at a table after a sentence has landed.

As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day that Moses sent me: as my strength was then, even so is my strength now, for war, both to go out, and to come in.Joshua 14:11

The sentence and the handing over

Now the distinction he has spent eight days finding, because it matters and almost nobody separates the two.

Handing a thing on is good. It is right, it is often overdue, and a man who cannot ever do it has a problem. If he hands that work to his nephew next spring, having decided it himself, that will be a good day and nobody will have lost anything.

Being told it is time is a different transaction. In that one, something is taken rather than given, and the thing taken is not the work; it is the standing to decide.

You were never handed a date by anybody at that table. Psalm 31:15 says my times are in thy hand, and the hand named there is not a nephew's and not a well meaning relative's; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) holds the timing of a man's life.

This is yours right now, in a courtyard with a cold cup: the standing to decide what you begin. Psalm 92:14 says they shall still bring forth fruit in old age, present and continuous; the Spirit who inspired that psalm did not attach an upper limit to the bearing.

Fruit, and not one more achievement

Let me be careful about what Caleb's story is and is not for, because it gets used badly.

It is not a promise that a man of seventy three will be given a mountain. Caleb had a specific word about that specific ground from forty five years earlier, and most people do not have anything of the kind, and pretending otherwise sells a false thing to somebody who has too little time left to waste on it.

What the passage does establish is simpler and it is enough: nobody in Scripture is retired by age from asking. Caleb at eighty five is not described as unusual for his boldness; he is described as a man who wholly followed the Lord, and the asking comes out of that.

You have never been aged out of the asking. Joshua 14:14 says Hebron became Caleb's inheritance because he wholly followed the Lord God of Israel, and the reason given is not his vigor; the Holy Spirit who preserved that verse gave the ground for it as following rather than as strength.

And fruit is not output here either. If he keeps the work for two more years, that is not the point. If he hands it over in March and begins something else entirely, that is not the point either. Fruit is what grows on a man who stays attached, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, at any age, in any decade.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. Out here with the cold cup, in the ten minutes before you go in, tell Him one true thing about the eight days with nothing asked for. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody counts that.