The Fence I Built on Rented Ground

The sign went up on a Tuesday in October, at the end of the lane, on the corner post he set himself in nineteen ninety four. He knows the post. He knows what he hit at three feet down and what he did about it. He drove past the sign at ten past six on his way to the feed store and did not slow down, and drove past it again at seven forty on the way back and did slow down, and then pulled into the field entrance and shut the engine off and let the tailgate down and sat on it.

Thirty years on that ground. He cleared the north end when it was head high in brush. He put four thousand feet of fence on it in two long summers and the line is still straight and everybody who drives the county road can see that it is still straight. He rented it every one of those thirty years, from a man who died and then from a son who lives eleven hours away and has never once walked it.

There is a thing that happens when you sit on a tailgate at seven forty in the morning with a sold sign in your mirror, and it is not grief exactly. It is arithmetic. He has been doing it for two days now. What he actually has: a truck with two hundred and ten thousand miles on it, a house that is paid for, a bad shoulder, and a fence line on ground that in ninety days is going to belong to somebody who will probably take it out.

That is the sum. He has done it four or five different ways and it comes out the same every time, and the answer is the one he has been half expecting for thirty years and has never said out loud, which is that when you take away what he does not get to keep, there is not much of a figure left with his name on it.

The sun came up over the treeline while he sat there and lit the whole north end orange, the part he cleared, and he looked at it the way you look at a photograph of somebody.

You have sat on that tailgate. It might not be ground. It might be a business, a house, a department, a marriage, a thing you gave the strong years to that is now going to be somebody else's or nobody's. And you have done the arithmetic, and you have got the same answer every time, and here is the part that will surprise you: the Bible got that answer first, and it did not flinch.

Somebody already did this arithmetic

I have to be careful right at the start, because there is a version of this that hands a man a better column to add up and calls it comfort. It is not comfort. Telling him to count souls instead of acres is the same arithmetic with a different unit, and it leaves him doing sums on a tailgate for the rest of his life. So I am not going to give him a new unit. I am going to hand him a book.

There is a man in the Bible who had more to show than anybody reading this and who sat down and did exactly the sum you have been doing. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labor I had labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun (Ecclesiastes 2:11). He had houses, vineyards, pools, orchards, herds, silver. He looked at all of it and wrote no profit, and God put that sentence in the Bible and left it there.

You are not being punished with an answer nobody else got. That answer is in the book, in Ecclesiastes 2:11, in the words of the richest man in the story, and the Spirit who saw fit to preserve it did not put a correction under it. Everybody who has ever added it up honestly gets the same total. You are not the exception. You are in company.

Now hear what the Preacher does next, because it is not despair. Under the sun, he says, over and over. That is his phrase for the whole accounting, everything measured inside the fence line of a life. He is not saying there is nothing. He is saying there is no profit in that column, and then he spends the rest of the book looking somewhere else.

Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun.Ecclesiastes 2:11

What was never in the column

Here is where the tailgate arithmetic goes wrong, and it does not go wrong at the subtraction. It goes wrong before the first entry.

He has been counting what he made. Acres cleared, feet of fence, bushels off a good year. Every one of those is output, and every one of them is exactly the kind of thing the Preacher already valued at nothing. What has never once gone in the column is what grew on the man while he was out there, because he cannot see it and he did not make it and it was never his to enter.

You have grown a great deal that has never been in any column you keep. Galatians 5:22 lists what the Spirit grows, and it is not a list of works; it is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, and a man who has kept a fence line straight for thirty years on ground he does not own has more longsuffering in him than he has ever thought to notice. The Holy Spirit grew that. He did not decide to have it.

And there is the other half, the half that left with other people. This is yours whether you are ever shown it or not: what came off you into somebody else's life on this road. John 15:5 says the branch that stays in Him bears much fruit, and the branch is not the one who counts it; the Spirit does the carrying, and He carries it away from the branch, which is the whole point of fruit.

The ground was never the wage

Let me say the hard thing plainly, because a straight man deserves a straight sentence.

He is not going to keep the ground. The sign is up, ninety days is ninety days, and nothing in Scripture promises a man the field he improved. If somebody tells him God is going to work it out so he gets that ground, they are writing checks on an account they do not hold, and when it does not happen he will have one more reason to believe none of this is real.

But here is what Scripture does say, and it says it about wages. Colossians 3:23 tells a man to do his work heartily as to the Lord and not to men, and then adds that of the Lord he shall receive the reward, because he serves Christ. Of the Lord. Not of the landowner, not of the son eleven hours away, not of the fence line.

You were working for a different employer the entire time, and He has never once been late. That is Colossians 3:24, not my sentiment, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it is the one who has kept a man getting up at five for thirty years for wages he could not see.

It is already settled who owns the field, and it was never the man on the deed. Psalm 24:1 says the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof, which means that ground has changed hands exactly zero times in the only registry that matters, and the Spirit who inspired that psalm was on the north end when it was head high in brush.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the drive you already make, or in the ten minutes the truck takes to warm up, tell Him about one morning out there that produced nothing at all. The frost on the wire. A dog. A thing you thought about at the far end and never told anybody. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. That is a branch sitting in the vine. Nobody adds it up.