The Long Way Around the Field

He goes out at ten past five, the way he has since he was nineteen, and there are two ways to the north gate.

The short way is the tractor track that runs along the ditch. Four minutes. Straight past the bench that he built out of the old barn boards the summer their granddaughter was born, and that Ruth used to sit on with her coffee while the dog worked the hedge.

The long way is around the outside of the whole field, along the fence line, up the far corner and back down. Fourteen minutes.

He has taken the long way every morning since February.

He would not tell anybody this. It is the kind of thing that sounds soft when it is said out loud and he has no words for it that would survive being spoken in front of another man. So he just goes left at the gate instead of right, and nobody has ever noticed, because there is nobody left in that house to notice.

What people have done is stop their trucks.

Dale from the co-op leaned out and said she was not suffering any more, which is true, and which sat on him for two days. The fellow who hauls his cattle said everything is on a schedule, ours and hers alike. His own brother, at the kitchen table, told him God does not make mistakes, and then looked at his hands, and then talked about the price of feed for forty minutes because neither of them could go anywhere else with it.

And the woman from the church left a card in the mailbox that said she knew exactly how he felt, and he read it standing at the mailbox and put it in the glovebox and it is still in the glovebox.

Every one of them is a decent human being. Every one of them said a true or half true thing. Not one of them made a single morning easier.

And the worst of it, the part he will not say, is that he cannot find God out there either. He has looked. He has stood in that far corner at first light with his hat in his hand more mornings than he could count, and it has been quiet, and the quiet is not the same as the peace they keep telling him about.

If that is a fence line anybody recognizes, there is a verse for exactly this and it is going to surprise you.

A man in the Bible could not find Him either

Here it is, and I want you to read it slow, because most people have never had it read to them at all.

Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I cannot perceive him: On the left hand, where he doth work, but I cannot behold him: he hideth himself on the right hand, that I cannot see him.Job 23:8-9

That is a grieving man walking the four directions looking for God and reporting, in Scripture, that he came up empty in every one of them.

Forward. Backward. Left. Right. It is a man walking his own fence line.

And Scripture did not tidy that up. It did not add a line underneath saying he was mistaken, or that his faith was thin, or that he should have looked harder. It let the report stand. And two verses later the same man says that God knows the way that he takes.

Both of those are in the mouth of the same man in the same speech. He cannot find Him and he is not lost. That is not a contradiction; that is the honest position of about half the people who have ever loved God through something.

You are not backslidden for coming up empty in the far corner, and you were never required to feel Him in order to be with Him. Job 23:8 is written in the book exactly as it stands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that a man's dry morning got preserved for another man's dry morning three thousand years later.

What the trucks were doing

I am not going to let you finish this page holding anything against Dale or your brother, because you have to farm alongside them and it would cost you more than it costs them.

Here is what happens in a truck window. A man drives up on another man whose wife has died. He has about four seconds. He cannot fix it, he cannot mention it properly without both of them coming apart in a field, and standing there with nothing is more than most men can manage.

So he says the thing. Not because he thinks it will help. Because he has to say something and that is what came up.

It is not a lecture. It is a man too shaken to be quiet.

Keep every one of them. Keep Dale, keep your brother, keep the woman who wrote the card. And take those sentences out of the glovebox in your chest and leave them in the field.

You are not obliged to be helped by a true sentence, and you were never asked to agree with anybody's version of February. Job 23:8 is written down without a correction attached, and the Spirit of God has never once asked a widower to sign off on somebody's explanation before He would come near.

The difference between quiet and absent

Now the part that matters most out there at first light, and it is the thing nobody ever explains to a man in a field.

Quiet is not the same as gone.

A man can sit in a truck with another man for two hours and say nine words. Two of them can work a whole afternoon on a fence with nothing more than a nod at the gate. Farmers know, better than most people alive, that the deepest company on earth mostly runs silent, and that the man who fills every mile with talk is usually the one who is not comfortable.

You are fluent in that kind of company already, and you were raised inside it. That is why the written word can say the Lord is near without ever saying audible, and why the Holy Spirit does not need a sound in order to be in a truck.

So why would you take God's silence as God's absence, when you would never take a neighbor's silence that way?

There is a psalm that says He is near to the broken hearted. It does not say audible. It does not say felt. It says near, which is a position, not a sensation, and a position does not evaporate because you cannot detect it at five in the morning in a cold field.

You are accompanied on that long way around, and you have been accompanied on every one of those fourteen minutes since February. Job 23:10 has the same man saying God knows the way that he takes even while he cannot find Him, and the Spirit who inspired both halves of that speech is the one walking the fence line beside you.