The Husbandman Has Long Patience

It runs out at the same place every time, and the place is not what anybody would guess.

It is not traffic. It is not a line and it is not a slow person and it is not a machine. He is genuinely fine with all of those, which is why the people who know him would tell you he is a patient man, and why he has spent nineteen years knowing they are wrong.

It runs out when he has explained a thing twice and has to explain it a third time.

Something happens on the third one. Not on the outside; he has that under control and has had for years. Inside, something closes and a small door shuts and a voice that is entirely his own says a sentence about the other person, and the sentence is contemptuous, and it arrives in half a second and it always arrives at exactly the same place.

He is forty three. He has known about the third explanation since he was twenty four and somebody pointed it out.

He has read about patience. He has done the thing where you learn what it costs the other person to ask. He has genuinely tried to be interested in why a thing is not landing, which was good advice and which has made him better at the second explanation and has done nothing whatsoever to the third.

And what he came out here to think about is not the failing, it is what the failing means.

Because a man who has known his own exact breaking point for nineteen years and has not been able to move it by one inch has to conclude something, and what he concluded, somewhere in his thirties, is that patience is a thing some people have and he is not one of them.

He rides out this way most evenings and stops at this gate, and there is a plowed field on the other side of it that is doing nothing at all, which is what a field does for about five months of the year, and the light along it at this hour is very good.

You have your place. It is specific and it is repeatable and you know it to the second. And the failing is not the trouble; the conclusion you drew from it is. There is a verse in James about patience that gives it to somebody, and it is not the person you would expect.

The patience belongs to the farmer

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is exactly where somebody normally prescribes. Learn to sit with the third explanation. Practice noticing the door as it closes. Build tolerance. I am not going to do that. Patience is on the list in Galatians as fruit the Spirit grows, and a man who has already run nineteen years of private drills does not need a twentieth.

James writes: Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain (James 5:7).

Now look at the picture he chooses, because everybody reads it as an instruction and almost nobody reads it as a scene.

There are two things in that field. There is a farmer and there is ground. And James assigns the long patience to the farmer. The ground is not being patient. The ground is not doing anything at all; it is lying there through the whole of the waiting, unable to hurry itself, unable to produce a thing until the rain comes.

You have been the ground in that picture and the long patience was always somebody else's. That is not me twisting the verse; James 5:7 gives the waiting and the long patience to the husbandman and gives the ground nothing to do, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that image picked a scene in which the slow thing is not being blamed.

And notice what the farmer is waiting for. The precious fruit of the earth. He is not waiting for the ground to try harder. He is waiting for something to come up out of it that neither he nor the ground can manufacture, and he waits, and the waiting is described as long.

Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it.James 5:7

Nineteen years at the same gate

Now the conclusion, because it is the thing that has actually cost him.

Patience is a thing some people have and I am not one of them. That is the sentence, and it was reached in his thirties, quietly, without a hearing, on the evidence of a breaking point that has not moved.

Here is what that sentence cannot account for. He is fine with traffic, with lines, with slow people, with machines. He has been fine with all of those for nineteen years while running the same private assessment. Whatever is going on at the third explanation, it is not a general absence of patience; it is one specific place, and a man who has been told he is patient by everybody who knows him has been overruling all of them on the basis of one repeatable half second.

You have never been the sum of your narrowest half second. 1 Samuel 16:7 says man looks on the outward appearance but the Lord looks on the heart, and a man staring at his own worst reflex is looking at an outward thing too; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has been reading nineteen years that one half second cannot describe.

This is yours right now, standing at a gate in the gold: a long patience that belongs to the farmer and is being exercised toward you. James 5:7 puts it on the husbandman; the Spirit who inspired that image made the waiting God's activity in the scene rather than the reader's.

The rain is not on the ground's schedule

One more thing in that verse, and it is the part that will matter at four o'clock on the day this happens again.

Until he receive the early and latter rain. The farmer's long patience is not open ended optimism; it is directed at something that arrives from outside the field entirely, on a schedule the field does not set and cannot influence.

The ground does not decide when the rain comes. The ground also does not fail when it does not.

You were never in charge of when this grows. Deuteronomy 11:14 has God giving the rain of the land in his due season, and the season is His and the giving is His; the Holy Spirit who inspired that promise did not put the ground in the weather business.

Fruit is not output, and a plowed field in November is where it shows. Output would be a stretch of months without the half second, which he could produce by force and which would hold until a difficult Tuesday. Fruit is what grows out of ground that stays where it is, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. Out at this gate, in the ten minutes before the light goes, tell Him one true thing about the third explanation with nothing asked for and no drill attached. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody scores that.