Faithfulness As Weather To Get Through

Wendell Shaw had farmed the same hillside through forty one wet springs, and his method never changed once in all of them: collar up, head down, get through it.

That was not a complaint. Wendell would have told you a wet spring is not personal. It comes, you work in it, you keep the gates swinging and the culverts open, and eventually the sun comes back and you are still there. There is a kind of dignity in it and he had earned every ounce of his.

The trouble was that Wendell farmed everything that way, including the parts of his life that were not weather.

He prayed the way he plowed in the rain. He went to church the way he went to the dentist. He drove his wife's mother to her appointments in town for nine years without one complaint and without one minute of pleasure in it. He was faithful the way a man endures a season: honestly, thoroughly, and with his collar up the whole time.

Then came a morning at the end of a three week rain.

He went up the hill at first light to open the top gate, boots going down in the mud to the ankle, and he found Otis Renfrew already standing there. Otis leaned on the gate looking east, doing absolutely nothing, with the wet grass steaming and the light just starting to come over the far ridge.

Wendell said, "What are you doing up here?"

And Otis said, "Nothing. Looking at it. It's mine to look at."

Then he laughed, and Wendell laughed too, standing in the mud at the top of his own hill at sunrise, and something turned over in him that he could not have named at the time.

Because in forty one years, Wendell had never once stood on that hill without a job in his hands. Not once. Every square foot of that ground was a task to him. He owned six hundred acres and he had never looked at any of it.

And that was when he understood what he had done with God.

You know what he had done with God, because you have done it too.

You do right. Nobody who knows you would say otherwise. You show up, you keep your word, you are kind to the person nobody else is kind to, and you have not missed a Sunday in years.

And somewhere along the way, obedience became a wet season. Something to get through with your collar up. You are not bitter about it, which is what makes it so hard to see. You are just tired in a way that sleep does not touch, and if somebody asked you when you last enjoyed doing right, you would have to go back further than you would like to say out loud.

Come on up the hill. The light is coming over the ridge and there is nothing to do up here.

The verse that is not grading you

Psalm 1 gets used as a measuring stick and it was never built to be one. Here it is.

But his delight is in the law of the LORD; and in his law doth he meditate day and night.Psalm 1:2

Now, a careful man reads that and immediately checks himself against it, finds no delight anywhere in the vicinity, and quietly concludes he is the wrong kind of believer. Let me stop that right here.

That verse is not an entrance requirement and it is not a mood you owe anybody. It is a description of where a planted man ends up, and describing where a road goes is not the same as putting a gate across it.

So take this before we go a step further, and take it plainly: you are not failing a test that was never set. Psalm 1:2 describes a destination rather than a toll, and the Holy Spirit does not stand at the top of that hill checking your face for the right expression before He lets you through.

Wendell was not disobedient. Nobody on that road would have said so. He was faithful and he was tired, and those two things sit together in the same man all the time.

What He bound Himself to do about your heart

Here is the clause that changes the shape of this. It is God speaking about a thing He takes responsibility for Himself, and He uses the words I will four times in two sentences.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.Ezekiel 36:26-27

Read who is doing what in that. He gives the heart. He puts the spirit in. He takes the stone out. He causes the walking. Not one clause in there says the man works up an appetite for obedience and God rewards him for it.

Which means the gladness was never your assignment to manufacture. You have a God who bound Himself in Ezekiel 36:27 to cause the walking from the inside, and the Holy Spirit named in that verse is the same Spirit already at work in you, which is why a tired man reading this is not disqualified from anything.

Paul says the same thing with fewer words.

For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure.Philippians 2:13

Both to will and to do. The wanting is on His side of that sentence, not only the doing. That is not a small thing to a man who has been generating his own wanting for forty one years and running low.

Which half is settled, and which half is yours

Say it flat out. His half is settled: He put His own name to the new heart and to the causing of the walk, and that clause does not depend on how you feel about Tuesday. Your half is real and it is asked: keep His judgments, and do them. That is right there in the same verse, and I am not going to file the edges off it to make this article feel kinder.

But hear what the asking is and what it is not. You are asked to do it. You are nowhere asked to feel a certain way while you do it, and no verse anywhere makes a flat heart into a disqualification.

So let me say the thing nobody says out loud. A man who does right in the rain, with his collar up and no gladness in him anywhere, is doing right. That counts. Scripture never calls that hypocrisy, and the Spirit is not standing off to the side unimpressed. He is in the mud with the man, causing the walking, and the delight is where that road is going rather than the price of getting on it.