Nine Years of Road

They started the ridge road the summer he was eleven and they finished it the autumn he turned twenty.

Not because anybody was slow. Because the county did it the way the county does everything: they worked it when there was money and weather, and they stopped when there was not, and there were two years in the middle where nothing happened at all and a man at the store said out loud that they had given up.

He remembers the summer they only did the drainage. Nothing you could see. A whole season of work and the road looked exactly as it had in May.

He remembers the year of the cut through the shoulder of the hill, which was the year everybody talked about it, and the year after that when they did nothing.

And it is a good road. It has been a good road for thirty years. It takes eleven minutes off the run to town and it holds in weather that closes the low road, and nobody who drives it now knows that it took nine years and that there were two of those years when a reasonable man could have said it was finished for good.

He is fifty-two and he has been trying to get out from under the same thing since about January.

He does not need to name it here. It is his, and he has been at it, properly, with somebody helping.

And in June, six months in, he did what he does, which is he assessed it. And the assessment was: no visible change.

And he has been quietly folding ever since.

The farmer waits, and Scripture calls that patience rather than slowness

Let me say something about June before anything else, and it is not a soft thing.

A man who assesses at six months is a man taking it seriously. You were not moping. You did what you would do with a fence or a herd or a piece of ground: you looked at the work and asked whether it was going anywhere, and you would not be worth much if you never asked.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: no visible change at six months is not a finding, it is a season, and Scripture has a word for waiting through one and the word is not slow. That is not my kind reading of a hard summer, it is what stands written in James, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that line was with you in June when you filed the report.

Read what he uses to explain waiting, and notice who he chooses.

Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the Lord's coming. See how the farmer waits for the land to yield its valuable crop, patiently waiting for the autumn and spring rains.James 5:7

He picks a farmer. Not a saint in a cell. A man with ground.

And he names two rains, months apart, and the whole point of naming both is that there is a long stretch between them where a man who assessed the field would find nothing and would be wrong.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better report: what happened between January and June is a season, because the written word describes waiting through exactly that stretch and calls the man doing it patient, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been working the drainage while nothing showed on the surface.

Now let me put your own road beside it, since you have been driving on it for thirty years without hearing it.

The summer they did the drainage. A whole season, all of it under the ground, and at the end of it the road looked exactly as it had in May. Anybody assessing that road in September of that year would have reported no visible change.

And that summer is the reason the road holds in weather that closes the low road.

You have been assessing on the surface for six months while the drainage went in. What is written says the farmer waits for both rains, and the Holy Spirit does not do His work where it can be photographed.

And here is the guard, because it belongs and I will not skip it: nothing in this says a person should never look at their own progress, and nothing here says a fast change is not real. Some things break in a fortnight and that is God's doing too. What is being taken off you is the authority of a six-month assessment made by a man standing on the road looking at the road.