Watching the Fence Line

She started walking the fence in the fall of the year she took the place over, and she walked it for the reason anybody walks a fence, which is that a wire goes slack and a post heaves and you would rather find it yourself than have somebody call you about a cow in the road.

Forty acres. A quarter mile of it runs along the top where the ground rises and the light comes in flat and copper at the end of the day. That is the stretch she walks. Always at the same hour, because that is the hour the work lets go of her.

The Hollis place is on the other side of that quarter mile.

Six years ago they put up a hay barn with a standing seam roof. Four years ago they painted every board of the fence on their side white, which nobody in that county does, and which looks, she will admit if you get her honest, very fine at seven in the evening in September. Three years ago they dug a pond down in the swale and stocked it, and now there are two Adirondack chairs down there and on Sunday evenings there are people in them.

She can tell you the week the roof went on. She can tell you which spring they redid the gate posts and how many days it took them, because she has stood at that corner and worked it out. She can tell you the color they painted the barn door and that they changed it once.

Here is what she cannot tell you.

She cannot tell you when the crabapple by her own gate started bearing again. It had four bad years and everybody said take it out, and she never did, and this summer it came in so heavy that a limb on the east side is down on the grass with the weight of it. She walks past that tree twice a day. Her granddaughter picked half a bucket off it last Sunday and set them on the porch rail in the sun, and she said something pleasant about it and went back in the house.

She has forty acres. She has a spring lot she has never once mown for the pleasure of looking at it. She has a hill that goes gold for about eleven minutes in the second week of October, every year, in a way people drive out from town to see, and she has watched it from the corner post with her attention pointed the other way.

This evening she got up to the corner and stood there like she does. The light came across. The white boards on the far side lit up the way they do.

And she caught herself doing something she had never once noticed in six years of doing it.

She was standing with her back to her own field.

What that proverb is actually doing

There is a line in Proverbs that has been used to shame more people than almost any other, and read plainly it is not a shaming at all. It is a doctor's note.

A sound heart is the life of the flesh: but envy the rottenness of the bones.Proverbs 14:30

Look at where the injury lands. Not on the neighbor. Not on the fence. On the bones of the one carrying it. That is not a judge assigning a penalty, that is a physician naming an ache and telling you where it hurts, which is the first kind thing anybody has done about it in six years.

And read the half of the verse nobody quotes. A sound heart is the life of the flesh. Soundness comes first in the sentence, and soundness is a gift. Nobody in that proverb is told to want less. Somebody is told there is such a thing as a heart that is whole, and that it is life, and that it is available.

You are not standing at that fence because something is rotten in your character. I mean that literally rather than gently. Proverbs 14:30 names the rot as an injury rather than a verdict, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old written diagnosis and reads it out at the corner post in a voice that is not accusing anybody.

Now here is the part that matters most on this ground, and I want to be plain about it because you have probably been handled badly here. The looking is not greed. The eye goes where the hunger goes. She was not a bad neighbor and she never wished the Hollises one bad day in her life. She was a hungry woman standing in the only place where anything was on display, and hunger will aim itself at whatever is lit up at seven in the evening.

You have a real appetite that went looking for a real object, and it found a fence. His word treats the heart as something to be made sound rather than something to be scolded flat, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked you to want less as the price of being helped.

The lines fell, and somebody drew them

There is a psalm about property lines. That is not a figure of speech, that is literally the subject.

The LORD is the portion of mine inheritance and of my cup: thou maintainest my lot. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places; yea, I have a goodly heritage.Psalm 16:5 and 6

Read the order it comes in. The portion is named first, and the portion is not the land. The portion is the Lord Himself, and the cup is His, and the lot is maintained by Him rather than by the one holding it. Only after that does the psalm get around to where the lines fell, and by then the lines are being described by a man who already has the best thing in the deed.

That is why it reads as delight instead of resignation. It is not a man talking himself into a smaller life. It is a man who has been given the Owner and is now walking his own ground for the first time with his eyes open.

You were given a portion that is a Person, and no fence in the county has ever been able to move it one inch. Psalm 16:5 says the Lord is the portion of the cup, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old surveyor's line out of a psalm and lays it over forty acres somebody stopped seeing six autumns ago.

And here is the strange mercy of that verse. It does not turn her around by telling her the Hollis place is nothing. It is not nothing. It is a fine barn and it is a good pond and the white boards do look well at seven o'clock. Nothing is taken away from them to give anything to her. There is simply another field, on this side, with a tree in it that is down on the grass with the weight of what it is carrying, and she has been standing four feet from it with her back turned.

You are the owner of a field you have not looked at in six years, and it has been bearing the entire time. Psalm 16:6 says the lines fell in pleasant places and the heritage is called goodly by God rather than by the neighbors, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping that ground for you through every evening you spent at the corner post.