The Deed Was Filed in March

The frost has not come off the top wire yet, and Dale is already at the corner post where the line turns north.

He walks it most Saturdays. Nothing is wrong with the fence. He walks it because a man ought to know his line, because his father walked it, and because for nineteen years the walking was the only part of this place that felt like his. The far field sits up over the rise, forty acres, and it has been coming into cedar for three seasons. The small ones first, the ones a man can pull by hand. Then the ones that want a saw.

He stops at the post and looks up at the rise the way he has looked at it since spring, and the thought arrives the way it always arrives, in the shape of a question.

Am I allowed to cut that.

Not should I, not when, not with what. Allowed. There is a difference and he can feel it under his coat, and what lands on him is that there is nobody left to ask. The last note cleared in March. He drove into town on a Tuesday with the payment and a folder, sat in a molded plastic chair while a woman stamped a page, and she said congratulations and he said thank you. He drove home. He ate supper. He went to bed. He got up the next morning and walked his fence like a man working somebody else's ground.

Nineteen years he asked permission for everything up here, and the asking was never a humiliation, it was just the arrangement. You called before you took a tree. You called before you moved a gate, and there was a kind of rest in that, if you want the truth of it, because a man who has to ask is a man who cannot be blamed. The far field is not a decision he is afraid to make. It is a decision he has never once in his life been the one to make.

So every Saturday he walks up to the corner post, and every Saturday he turns around at it, and the cedar gets another week.

Look at his hand on the wire. He is not doubting God. He carries a folded page in the glove box with a recording stamp on the corner, and he has read it four times sitting in the truck with the engine off, the way a man reads a thing he cannot quite hold.

And you are the one at the corner post.

I do not know what your far field is and I am not going to reach for it. Maybe it is a field. Maybe it is a room in your own house that you use like a guest. Maybe it is a whole way of living, and the arrangement ended a long time ago, and you are still calling somebody before you take a tree. So here is what I came up the hill to say, and I will say it plain, because you did not come out here for a lecture. The deed was filed in March. The name on it is yours. And what keeps you off that rise is not a boundary, and it is not sin, and it is not weakness. It is nineteen years of asking, still running in a man who has nobody left to ask.

The word a tenant never says

There is a word a tenant does not use, and it is the whole subject this morning.

Paul is writing to people who came out of real bondage, and he does not tell them to feel differently about it. He tells them what they received, in the language of a household instead of the language of a lease.

For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, "Abba! Father!"Romans 8:15

Abba. That is not a formal word and it never was. It is what a child says in his own kitchen, without an appointment, without knocking, without the small cough at the door that a man makes when he is about to ask for something he is not certain he can have. A hired hand may love the family he works for and give them forty faithful years. He does not walk into that kitchen at six in the morning and call the head of the house by a name like that, because he knows exactly what he is, and what he is, is welcome to be here.

Hear where this comes from, because it is not my idea about you. It is written in Romans 8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts a household word into a mouth that has said sir for nineteen years: you have received the Spirit of adoption, and the receiving is finished, and it happened the moment your standing changed rather than the moment your feelings caught up with it.

Notice what the verse refuses to do. It never tells the reader to stop being afraid. It tells him what he did not receive. No spirit of slavery was handed out at that door, so the fear that keeps a man at the corner post did not come to him from God and carries none of God's authority when it speaks. A reflex with no authority behind it is still loud, and loud is not the same thing as legal.

The years of asking are not held against you either. There is no scolding anywhere in that verse. Scripture does not go back over nineteen Saturdays and total them up, and His Spirit is not standing at the post keeping the tally: you are a son under the arrangement that exists now, and nothing done while the old one was running has any effect at all on the page that got filed.

March, and a drawer in the courthouse

Here is the part that steadied me when I first saw it.

The date on that page is not a feeling. It is a date. Somebody stamped it, somebody filed it, and it sits in a drawer in a building in town whether Dale is up at the corner post or asleep in his chair. A legal fact does not go dim when he stops thinking about it and does not brighten when he starts. It stands in the record, being true.

His word keeps no separate register for men who came up hard, and His Spirit is not running a second policy behind the one He published. So take the sentence at full weight: you were moved out of one household and into another by an act nobody consulted you about, and it is already settled, and the settling does not live in your chest, it lives in the record.

So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.Galatians 4:7

An heir. Look at what that word does to a far field. An heir does not call ahead before he takes a tree on the place he inherited, not because he is bold and not because he is arrogant, but because there is nobody on the other end of the line. The office that used to answer is closed. It closed in March.

I know the next thought, because it is the honest one. If it is mine, why does it not feel mine. Friend, listen to me. Nineteen years of one arrangement does not wash out of a body in six months, and a body that still reaches for the phone is not a body in rebellion, it is a body that learned. Dale's hand knows that gate latch in the dark. Of course his mouth knows how to ask. This is yours already, in the shape of a stamped page and a name and a date, and Galatians 4 is where it is written, and the Spirit of God is the one turning a recorded page into ground under a pair of boots.

One thing plainly before we go on, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the standing still has gone somewhere darker than a fence line, if the nights have been bad and things have gone further down than you have told anybody, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger to you at all reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you while you talk. Walking into help is not a break in the fence. It is one of the ordinary things free men do.