It Will See Me Out

The post has been going for years and everybody in the lane knows it. It leans about eleven degrees off, and when the wind gets round from the east the whole panel does a slow lift and settle, lift and settle, like something breathing in its sleep.

So out he comes again on the Saturday with a length of batten, four screws and the drill that needs its battery charged for twenty minutes first. Screw the batten across the split, brace it against the good post, done. Fourth time. Possibly fifth. Down the lane somebody is doing something noisy with a strimmer and the smell of cut grass is going everywhere, and two doors up they have got a paddling pool out and a radio on, and it is one of those afternoons that will be over before anybody notices it happened.

The boy from next door but one, who is about twelve and has no filter whatsoever, stands and watches him for a while with a football under his arm.

Why don't you just put a new post in, he says.

And the man says it without thinking at all, the way you say a thing you have said in your head four hundred times. It will see me out.

The boy looks at him. See you out of what?

And that is the end of the conversation, because the boy has already gone after the ball, and it is the end of nothing at all for the man, who is standing in a back lane on a warm afternoon with a bit of batten in one hand and no answer whatsoever in the other.

Because he has an answer, in fact. He just would not say it out loud to a twelve year old with a football, and I suspect you might have one too, and I suspect it is roughly this: what would be the point. Somewhere in the last few years, without one single decision being made, a horizon moved in. Nothing gets bought that lasts. Nothing gets planned past next year. The bag of postcrete he bought with real intentions is in the shed and it went hard a long time ago, and he keeps it there, which tells you something.

God told exiles to plant gardens

Let me name the low place honestly before I say anything else, because this one is rarely named at all.

A shrinking horizon is not a decision. Nobody sits down and resolves to stop planning. It happens by degrees and it happens for a hundred different reasons: a bereavement that made the future feel unserious, a stretch of years that took more than they gave, a body that changed the terms, or a hope so real that everything ordinary started to look like wallpaper. And every one of those is a wound rather than a fault. If your own life has been running in twelve month lengths, nobody on this page is coming for you about it. It is a tender thing, not a shameful one.

But I want you to see what God does with people who genuinely, verifiably, have every reason to live provisionally.

He writes them a letter, and the letter says this:

Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce.Jeremiah 29:5

That is written to exiles. People taken from their own country and living in somebody else's, who knew for certain they were not staying and knew for certain this was not home. If anybody in Scripture had the right to live out of a suitcase, it was them. And God tells them to build. To plant. To put in fruit trees, which is the most patient thing a human being can do with a Saturday, because a fruit tree is a letter you write to a year you have not met.

So take this and let it stand up in you: you are permitted the whole of your life, right now, at full size. Not a rationed version of it. That is not a warm thought I am adding on top of Scripture, it is what God Himself said to people whose situation was a great deal more provisional than yours, and it is His Spirit who takes a letter carried to Babylon and lays it along a back lane on a Saturday afternoon.

And notice what He did not say. He did not tell them to sit tight, keep their heads down, or hold their lives lightly until further notice. He gave no instructions about being ready, because their readiness was never the point and neither is yours. He told them to get the garden in.

Now the New Testament does the same thing, and it does it in the most striking possible place.

Paul writes the longest, highest, most soaring chapter in all his letters about the resurrection and the last things, and he takes it all the way up. And then, at the very end of it, he lands. Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. First Corinthians 15:58.

Read that as the conclusion it is. He does not finish with brace yourselves. He does not finish with wind it down. He spends a whole chapter on what is coming and then says: so get on with it, and nothing you do is wasted. The hope's own conclusion, in its own words, is an ordinary week done at full stretch.

Which means nothing in your ordinary life is filler. The tree you plant, the trip you book, the person you love slowly over years, the post you set properly in concrete: none of it is wasted and none of it is beside the point. Scripture ties the not-wasting directly to the hope rather than in spite of it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that stop being an argument and start being a relief.

I will say the other half too, because this site does not deal in urgency. There is nothing here telling you the time. Nobody on this page knows it, and anybody who tells you they do is selling something. What you are given is not a calendar. It is a promise about the character of the One who is coming, and a life to live in the meantime that He plainly wants lived.

So here is the last thing, and it is the smallest. Jesus said the amount of trust needed to shift a mountain is the size of a seed. Matthew 17:20. A seed, of all the images available to Him: the one object in the world whose entire nature is that it is planted now for something you have to wait for. And the seed speaks. It does not brace, it does not hunker, it does not wait quietly and hope for the best. It is put in the ground, and something is said over it.

You have the standing to say it. That standing belongs to you because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence, not the confidence of the person saying it.