The Third Dry Year

The gauge is on the corner post by the shop, and he reads it at last light, and he has read it at last light since he was nineteen years old.

There is a book in the shop for the numbers. Spiral bound, hanging off a nail by a loop of baling twine, one line a day. His father kept the same book and his father's writing is still in the front of it.

The last two and a half years of that book are a column of zeros with the occasional two tenths in it like a typing error.

He is not a man who panics. He has sold down twice, he has hauled water, he knows what the county is doing and what the neighbors are doing, and he does all the things a competent man does. That is not what this is about.

This is about the door.

In the first dry year, in the spring, he stood on an upturned bucket and wrote a line on the inside of the shop door with a carpenter's pencil. He did it in about eleven seconds. He was not being sentimental and he did not tell his wife. He wrote it because he meant it, and because the shop door is the last thing he sees before he turns the light off.

It is still there. Carpenter's pencil does not come off.

And the trouble is that the door swings in, so when he hangs his coat the words are three inches from his face, in his own handwriting, every night of a third dry year. He has started closing the door with his shoulder so he does not have to look at it. He would not say that out loud to anybody.

Then in March the boy came home. Twenty-three, working in town, good lad, and he came out to the shop while his father was putting the gauge reading in the book, and he read the door the way you read a thing you have read a thousand times and are suddenly seeing.

And he said, not unkindly, with no edge in it at all: Dad. Do you actually still believe that?

He said yes.

He said it the way you answer a question about a fence line. Straight, no hesitation, no speech after it. The boy nodded and they talked about the pickup and he went back to town on the Sunday.

And his father stood in that shop with the light off and the door shut and thought the thing he has been carrying ever since. Not: is it true. He is a long way past the point of wondering whether God is honest.

What he thought was: I have said yes for three years, and I could not show that boy one single thing.

You have stood in that shop.

Abraham had a gauge too

Paul goes back and looks at a man who held a promise for twenty-five years with the evidence sitting in the same room, and he is careful about what he says and does not say.

Who against hope believed in hope, that he might become the father of many nations, according to that which was spoken, So shall thy seed be. And being not weak in faith, he considered not his own body now dead, when he was about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb: He staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith, giving glory to God; And being fully persuaded that, what he had promised, he was able also to perform.Romans 4:18-21

Notice first what the contradiction was. It was not out on the horizon somewhere. It was his own body, which he saw every morning, and it was hers, and there was no arguing with either. Nobody had to tell Abraham the situation. He had the numbers, daily, for a quarter of a century.

And I want to say the next part carefully, because this passage gets used as a stick and it was never a stick.

Read Genesis alongside it and you find Abraham on his face laughing at the promise, and Sarah laughing behind the tent flap, and God asking, plainly, why she laughed. Two people who laughed at it. And the promise did not move one inch on either occasion, and the son came anyway, and the man Paul is describing as fully persuaded is that same man, laugh included. Paul is not writing an entrance requirement. He is telling you what the word of God did through a man who had no more evidence in hand than you do.

So hear this over the top of that column of zeros. You are held inside a promise whose strength is in the One who made it, and Romans 4:21 says the point is that He is able to perform what He promised, and the Holy Spirit lives in you as God's own down payment on that ability, which means the thing carrying this is not your steadiness.

What withers, and what does not

Now the other half, and it is the half your door is about.

There is a verse a man in a dry country ought to have in his mouth, and it does not flinch from the thing in front of him.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.Isaiah 40:8

Read what that sentence is willing to admit. It does not tell you the grass is fine. It does not tell you the flower is a matter of perspective. It puts the withering right there in the first clause, in the open, in the present tense, and then it draws a line and tells you what is standing on the other side of it.

That is not a lack of realism. That is the only honest promise anybody has ever offered you. A word that had to deny the drought would be no use to you in a drought.

I am not going to tell you why the rain went somewhere else. I do not know, and nobody who tells you they know is telling you the truth, and I am not going to assign a purpose to your third year in order to make my article tidy.

But I will tell you what has not happened. That line on the inside of your door has not weakened by a single letter in three years. Scripture calls the word of our God a thing that stands for ever, and His Spirit is the one who wrote it through men and has kept it legible ever since, and neither the pencil nor the promise cares what the gauge said last night.