Eleven Years of the Same Fence

There is a stretch of fence on the north side, about ninety yards, and he has mended it eleven springs running.

Same posts, mostly. Two he has replaced twice. The wire has been spliced in enough places now that he could walk it in the dark and tell you where every join is by feel, and he has, more than once, when a heifer got through at eleven o'clock at night.

His brother went to the city in 1994 and does something with logistics that nobody in the family has ever fully understood, and does it well.

And at his mother's eightieth, back in the fall, somebody at the far end of the table asked him what he had been up to. Meaning the year. And he said, oh, the usual, and everybody laughed, and it was a warm laugh and nothing unkind was meant by any of it.

He thought about it the whole drive home.

Eleven years on ninety yards of fence. The same hay ground. The same forty-odd head. The same drive to the same store on the same Thursday. His brother has moved four times and been promoted three, and he has spliced wire.

He is not bitter. That is not what this is. He would not swap.

But somewhere around the county line he found himself saying out loud, in an empty truck, the thing he had been carrying since the party: I do not think I have become anything.

The righteous are planted, and planting is not a small word

I want to name what is real about that drive home, because it was not self-pity and it deserves better than being talked out of.

Repetition is genuinely hard on a soul. It is hard in a way that difficulty is not. A hard year gives a man a story; eleven ordinary ones give him nothing to say at a table, and the family who asked did not mean a thing by it, and it still landed, and it is allowed to have landed.

But hear this, and take it as finished rather than as comfort: those eleven years have been making something and you have been standing too close to see it. That is not my kind word for a good man on a long drive, it is what stands written in the ninety-second Psalm, where the righteous are described as planted and still bearing when they are old, and the same Holy Spirit who put that image in the book has been growing something in you along ninety yards of wire.

Look at the verb the psalm uses, because it is not the one anybody would pick.

The righteous will flourish like a palm tree, they will grow like a cedar of Lebanon; planted in the house of the Lord, they will flourish in the courts of our God. They will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green.Psalm 92:12-14

Planted. Not launched. Not sent. Planted, which is the least dramatic thing that can be done to a living thing and the only one that produces a cedar.

A palm and a cedar are both slow. Neither of them does anything you could report at a table. And the psalm's boast is not what they achieved in a given year, it is that they are still bearing when they are old, which is a sentence about the far end of a long time.

So here is what is true of you right now, and it is not on approval: you are being made into something, and the material is the repetition, not despite it. Scripture says the righteous are planted and stay green, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the growing in a man who is doing the same thing again.

Now the honest part, and it is the reason the party stung.

You cannot see it. That is not a flaw in you and it is not false modesty. Nobody can see their own becoming, because the thing that would do the seeing is the thing being changed, and the written word says we are being transformed from one degree of glory to another, which describes a process nobody has ever watched happen to themselves.

But other people can see it, and they have not told you, because it is not the kind of thing that comes up.

Go and ask the man whose gate you fixed in the ice. Ask the woman who rings you first, still, after eleven years, when something has gone wrong at her place at an hour nobody rings anybody. Ask your own boy why he came home in June instead of going where his friends went.

None of that is on a résumé. All of it is a harvest, and it grew on the same ninety yards you have been calling nothing. The written word says a man is known by his fruit, and the Holy Spirit grew every bit of that while you were thinking about wire.