A Ledger for the Fence, Not the Field

The fence book lives on the shelf over the bench, and it is, without exaggeration, one of the finest documents in that county.

It starts in his grandfather's hand and it has never once lapsed. Every stretch is in it. The date a corner brace went in, what it was cut from, whether the timber was green or seasoned, how many staples that run took, which side of the post the wire sits on and why, the year the north boundary got restrained after the ground shifted, the month the creek crossing had to be rebuilt and what they did differently the second time.

He can open it anywhere and tell you the weather that week.

And a fence book is not a hobby. It is how a man stops making the same mistake twice on ground that will happily let him. He would tell you that if you asked, and he would be right, and there is nothing precious about him at all.

Last autumn a young couple took on the place next door. Nice people, working hard, entirely out of their depth, and they asked him if he would walk the boundary with them and tell them what they had.

It took the best part of a day and he loved every minute of it. Cedar there, and that will see them out. That brace went in the October after the big blow, so it has had its test already. Do not restrain that run any tighter, the ground moves under it in a wet spring, and here is the year that was learned.

Fifty-one years of a man's working life, and every bit of it retrievable.

They were walking back along the top with the light going when the young fellow asked him something else. No agenda in it. He said: You have been here fifty years. What is the best thing that has happened to you on this place?

And he gave a good answer. He talked about the family, and about a certain summer, and about the view they were standing in, and the young man was glad he asked, and they shook hands at the gate.

That night he sat at the kitchen table with the fence book open in front of him for no reason he could name.

And it went through him like cold water.

He could tell that boy the month a staple went into a post in 1974. He could not tell him the month God did one single thing.

Not because nothing happened. Things happened. He knows things happened, the way you know a room you walked through in the dark. But there is no book for them, there has never been a book for them, and fifty-one years of it has gone the way anything goes when nobody writes it down.

You have kept that same shelf.

Jacob answered God with a piece of construction

A man on the run sleeps rough in open country with a stone under his head, and God speaks a covenant over him in the night: I am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest.

Now watch what the man does at daybreak. He does not compose anything. He does not have an experience about it.

And Jacob rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had put for his pillows, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it.Genesis 28:18

He took the material that was on site and he set a post.

That is the whole of it, and I want you to feel how ordinary it is. There was no monument brought in. There was no ceremony he had been taught. There was a rock he had slept on, and it went from horizontal to vertical, and oil went on the top so anybody could see it had been set deliberately rather than dropped there, and the place got a name.

A man who keeps a fence book already understands every part of that. Marking ground so the next person knows what happened here is not sentiment. It is the opposite of sentiment. It is the reason your grandfather started writing.

So take this as said to you and not about somebody in a chapter. You are inside the same covenant God spoke over a man asleep on a stone, and Genesis 28:15 has Him saying I am with thee and will keep thee in all places, and the Holy Spirit is in you as God's own guarantee on that sentence, which is not a thing you have to feel in order to be standing in.

Hitherto is a modest word

Centuries later Samuel does the same job with the same material.

Then Samuel took a stone, and set it between Mizpeh and Shen, and called the name of it Ebenezer, saying, Hitherto hath the LORD helped us.1 Samuel 7:12

Hitherto. Up to here. Not a forecast and not a claim about next year. A stone that says what has already happened, planted at the place where it happened, so that a man walking past it in a bad season has to walk past a fact.

And notice the size of the material again. A stone. Not gold, not marble, not shipped in. Whatever was lying about.

Scripture did not ask Jacob for a better stone, and the Holy Spirit does not ask you for a better story. I say that because the commonest way a man like you never starts this book is that he thinks the entries have to be worth reading. They do not. If what you have is that the rain came the week it needed to, write the rain. If what you have is that your daughter rang on a night you were low and did not know why she rang, write that, with the month on it. If what you have is that you came out of a bad stretch and cannot say how, write the stretch and write the date it lifted.

Small and dated beats large and vague every time, and it is not close.

You are not short of material. You are short of a book, and those are entirely different problems, and Scripture calls a common field stone by the name Ebenezer without apologizing for the stone, while the Spirit of God is the one who brings a man's own history back to him when he sits down to write.