The limb came down in the night wind and it is lying across sixty feet of fence with the top wire pushed into the dirt, and he has been at it since half past five.
It is cottonwood, and cottonwood is heavier than it looks and wetter than it has any right to be. He has cut the small stuff off with the chainsaw and stacked it, and now what is left is the main leader, forty feet of it, thicker than a man's waist at the butt end, lying on his neighbor's fence, and beyond that fence are eleven yearlings and beyond the yearlings is the county road.
He has a bar. He has a chain. He has a come along hooked to the ball on the truck, and he has moved that limb perhaps four inches in an hour and forty minutes, and the light is going out of the west the way it does in August, all at once at the end.
There are three trucks within a mile of where he is standing. Vernon, two gates down, who has a tractor with a loader on the front of it and who would come at a run and be pleased to be asked. The Bakers, who have two sons in high school with nothing to do on a Tuesday. And the young man renting the trailer at the corner, who put a winch on his front bumper in June and has been looking for a reason to use it ever since.
His phone is in his shirt pocket. It has been in his shirt pocket the whole time. He has not taken it out.
He is not being proud, or he would not say that he was. If you asked him he would give you a shrug and a half a smile and say a man handles his own, and then he would go back to the bar. He could not tell you who told him that. Nobody ever said it to him in words that he can remember. It was in the air of the place he comes from, the way weather is in the air, and it has been the rule of his whole working life, and it is a rule with no author on it at all.
So he sets the bar again and gets under it, and it goes another inch, and the mosquitoes come up out of the grass, and the last of the light goes off the top of the hill.
You are the one at the fence. I am not going to tell you where your rule came from and I am not going to guess at your people, because I do not know them and it is not mine to know. What I am going to do is read you a line out of Scripture that God let stand in His own book, spoken over a good man by somebody who loved him, and left there for three and a half thousand years with no blame attached to it anywhere.
The rule with nobody's name on it
Let me name the weight before I touch it, because a man carrying this one has usually never heard it described out loud.
It is not the limb. The limb is Tuesday. It is that there is no size of thing, anywhere in your life, that is allowed to be bigger than you. Not a fallen tree, not a bad month, not a night you cannot sleep through. Every one of them has to be handled at your own end of the chain, alone, or it does not count. And the price of that rule is not the extra hours in the dark. The price is a quiet arithmetic that a man does about himself, which is that a man who needs a second pair of hands is a smaller man than the one who does not.
Listen to where this is written down, because it is not a saying of mine. Exodus 18 puts the sentence in the mouth of a father in law who came out into the wilderness to see how Moses was doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it out to a fence line at dusk. You have permission from the written word to be under something too heavy for you, and the permission is not a concession, it is an observation God saw fit to keep.
You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone.Exodus 18:18
Read who says that and read what happens next. Jethro says it to the man who had faced Pharaoh down and split a sea and gone up a mountain into fire, and he says it flatly, the way you would tell a man his tire is low. He does not say Moses is weak. He does not say Moses has failed. He says the thing is too heavy, which is a fact about the thing and not a verdict on the man, and then he tells him how to spread it, and Moses listens, and God does not send a single word of correction after him for listening.
That whole chapter sits in the Law, in the middle of the story of the greatest leader Israel ever had, and it is there on purpose. It is there because somebody was always going to need to see it written down in the Law itself. It is already settled, and it was settled a very long time before you ever picked up that bar, and the same Spirit who kept that chapter in the book is the one reading it into the grass beside you.
Nothing is being handed back to you
Now I want to be careful, because there is a way of preaching this that just swaps one rule for another, and I am not going to do that to you.
I am not telling you that you must call Vernon. I am not telling you that a good man asks for help, so now you have failed twice: once at the limb and once at the asking. That would be a new rule with my name on it instead of nobody's, and you would carry it the way you carry the other one, and you would be no freer at the end of this than you were at the start. Hear it plainly: no duty is being issued here. What is being lifted is a rule, and nothing is going in its place.
Because the rule was never God's. His word carries no clause about men who manage, and His Spirit is not keeping a separate ledger for them. You were never under that rule in the first place, and a rule you were never under has no right to stay on this fence line.
Bear one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.Galatians 6:2
And look at the shape of that command, because it has two ends. Somebody carries. Somebody is carried. If every man in the county keeps his own end and never hands anything over, that sentence has nowhere in the world to land, and the law of Christ goes unfulfilled in a place full of people who were each being strong on their own. A burden that is never handed over does not only cost the man holding it. It quietly cancels the errand of everybody who would have come.
God said it first, in Galatians 6, and the Spirit who inspired it is the one loosening the strap now. This is yours: the freedom to be a man under something heavy, in front of your neighbors, without it meaning one thing about who you are.
One plain thing before we go on, and I would rather say it and not be needed. If what you are under is not a tree, if the evenings have gone somewhere dark and you are holding weight that your own hands were never built for, tell one human being today, and if you are in any danger reach the crisis line where you live and stay with a real voice. That is not the rule you are putting down being replaced. That is a man doing what free men do.
Nothing is being asked of you here. That is the turn, and it is a strange one to receive, because you have spent a working life braced for the next thing being asked.
The rule that says asking is failing is not yours to obey, because it was never issued by anybody with the standing to issue it. It has no author, no signature, no date, and no seal. The written word has all four, and what the written word says is that a thing can be too heavy for one man and God will look straight at that and call it what it is. You are free of a rule tonight that you have kept faithfully for thirty years, and it is written in Exodus 18 with no blame anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one taking it off your shoulders in the dark.
What you do at the fence is yours. Call Vernon or do not call Vernon; leave the limb till morning or get under it once more. He is not standing over you with a clipboard. But whether you are a lesser man tonight than you were at half past five is not in question, and it never was, and the answer was written down in a wilderness a long way from your fence.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, at the fence, in the shed, or at the kitchen table with the pen still in front of you. Say them the way an ambassador says a thing: the standing is yours because you represent the King who put that chapter in His book, not because you finally feel entitled to say it. Every line stands on Scripture and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it, so a man with cottonwood sap on his hands is enough of a man to say them. Jesus told ordinary people to speak to a mountain, and the mountain here is not the limb. It is a rule with no author that has been running a whole working life. What God does about the fence, and about the neighbors, is His to decide, and I put no clock on Him, and the outcome is His.
- Limb lying across the wire, you are too heavy for one man, and that is a fact and not a verdict on me. It is written in Exodus 18 that the thing is too heavy and one man is not able to do it alone, and God let that sentence stand in His own book without a word of blame after it.
- Idea that a man who needs a second pair of hands is a lesser man, you have no author and no right to stay on this fence line. Scripture says bear one another's burdens, and a load that is never handed over leaves that command with nowhere on earth to land, and the Holy Spirit is the one who said so to me at dusk.
- Lord, You watched Moses take that word from a man who loved him and You never called it weakness, and Your word carries no clause about men who manage. In the name of Jesus the rule is off my back tonight, and my hands are free for whatever the morning actually needs.
Exodus 18:18
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