The Chain Came Off Two Winters Ago

The frost has not come off the gravel yet when the truck door shuts behind him, and the first thing his flashlight finds is the sign.

It was a white sign once. Now it is the color of weak tea, with a rust ring at each of the four bolts and a dent along one edge where somebody's tailgate caught it a long time back. TRAIL CLOSED, it says across the top, and under that, in letters that have nearly gone, SEASONAL CLOSURE. DO NOT PROCEED PAST THIS POINT.

He reads it. All of it, top line to bottom line, the way a man reads something he already knows by heart, and his breath goes out white through the beam.

Then he lifts his eyes to the path, where the ridge is beginning to take the first gray of the light and the pines are turning from black to green. Then he looks at the other post, the short one on the far side of the path, with its two eye bolts screwed in and nothing hanging from either of them.

The chain came off two winters ago.

He knows that. He was up here the week the county crew came with the flatbed and took the chain and the padlock and coiled the whole thing into the back, and he stood at the tailgate and talked with the foreman about the culvert work, and the two of them agreed it had been a long closure. He knows the date. He could tell you what the weather did that afternoon.

And every morning since, he has parked, walked to the head of the path, read the sign, and turned around.

It is not stubbornness and it is not the hill. He is not waiting for anybody to come out and tell him he may go up. He has been told, by the foreman at the tailgate, by two winters of weather, by his own eyes on two empty bolts. What he cannot get past is that the sign is still up. A man obeys a sign. That is what a sign is for. Nobody ever came back to take this one down, and so a rectangle of painted tin has been running his mornings on the authority of a decision that was reversed before the last two snows.

So he goes back down the gravel and sets the flashlight on the seat and pours out what is left in the flask, and drinks it looking through the windshield at the path he is not walking. Then he backs around and drives to work, and the light comes up over the ridge behind him.

You are the one at the trailhead. I am not going to guess what your closure was and I am not going to tell you what it did to you, because it is not mine to say and I was not standing there. What I have to say is smaller than all of that, and it is about a piece of tin. The thing across your path is not a chain. It is a notice that outlived the chain, and it has been giving orders for two winters that nobody with any authority is standing behind.

A sign is a record, not a gate

Let me name the weight before I lift a finger toward it, because it has been carried in the cold, on gravel, in the dark, and nobody has ever said it back to you.

It is not the closure. You came through the closure. It is the mornings since. The drive up, the walk to the post, the reading of the words, the turn, the drive down, and a small shut place in an ordinary Tuesday that nobody else can see. And under it, quietly, a conclusion a man would never say out loud on a work site: that whatever was done for him was left half done. That somebody got as far as the chain and never came back for the sign.

Now hear something over you, and hear where it comes from, because it is not mine. Psalm 107 is a song about people who were shut in, and it does not say their doors were unlocked. You are standing at an opening God made with His own hands and not at a door somebody left ajar, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that written line up the gravel to where your boots are.

For he shatters the doors of bronze and cuts in two the bars of iron.Psalm 107:16

Read the verbs. Shatters. Cuts in two. Not opens, not unlocks, not suspends until further notice. A bronze door that has been shattered is not a door any more; it is scrap in the dirt. A bar of iron cut through is two pieces of iron lying apart. Neither one swings back into place on a bad week, or on weather, or on the passing of enough time. The psalm is telling a man what kind of work was done on his behalf, and the kind is permanent, and it left nothing standing that could quietly resume.

That is not my reading of it. It is what is written, and the Spirit who put those two verbs in that psalm is the one saying them over a man in a parking area at six in the morning. You have an opening with no hinge left in it, and no hinge means nothing to swing.

The county took the chain; the tin stayed up

I want to be careful here, because I am not going to make a fool of a man for reading a notice. That sign was true once. Somebody with the right to put it there put it there, on a morning when the culvert had gone and the trail genuinely was not safe, and reading it and turning around was the right thing to do for as many mornings as the chain was on. A person who honors a notice is not a coward. He is a man with a conscience, and God is not embarrassed by him.

But a notice is a record of a decision, and a record is not the decision. The decision lives with the one who owns the ground. And the One who owns this ground came out to it Himself and did not send a crew.

...by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross.Colossians 2:14

Look at what He did with the paperwork. He did not file it. He did not leave it bolted up where it could go on issuing instructions to people walking past. He took the written thing that stood against you, nailed it where everybody could see it had been dealt with, and set it aside. It is already settled, and it was settled at the level of the One who owns the ground rather than at the level of the tin, and Scripture is where that is on record, and His Spirit is the one who turns a legal fact into ground a man can walk on.

So what is the sign now? Weather. It will come down, or it will stay up and go on fading, and either way it has no jurisdiction over a pair of boots. Whatever is still bolted at the head of your own path, you were released by an act that shattered and cut through, and it is written in Psalm 107 with two verbs and no conditions attached, and the same Spirit who inspired them is out on the gravel with you in the cold.

One plain thing before we go on, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If what is across your path is not tin at all, if the mornings have gone somewhere dark and you are carrying something your own hands cannot hold, tell one human being today, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and stay on it until a real voice is with you. Walking toward help is one of the ordinary things a free man does.