Four Lines You Would Still Stand For

Dale had a rick of oak going against the north wall of the shed, and by ten in the morning he was singing.

Not on purpose. It started the way it always starts, somewhere under the work, when the maul comes down and the halves fall away and your hands know what to do without your head. Four lines. Then the same four lines. Then the same four lines again, for the better part of an hour, while the pile of split oak got taller and the cold sawdust came up smelling like a church basement in 1990.

He got to the end of the fourth line and reached for the fifth and there was nothing there.

He stopped with a piece of locust in his hand. Tried it again from the top. Got the four, ran clean out at the fifth, and stood there in the cold with his breath going up past the blue tarp folded over the top of the rick, the one with the torn grommet he keeps meaning to fix.

Somewhere he had known the whole thing. Four verses, and a chorus, and the way the alto part sat under the melody, and which stanza they skipped when the service was running long.

Now he had four lines.

He set the locust on the pile. He thought about how much a person can lose without noticing the day it went. Not one big day. A hundred small ones. Somebody says something at a potluck and you stop going to the potluck. A book gets read and a question gets asked and never gets answered. A voice that used to be warm on the phone goes formal. And a while later you are standing in your own yard with a maul in your hand and four lines is what came with you.

Except this is the part he could not get around, and it is why he stood there so long.

He would still stand up for those four lines.

Not stand up in a building. Stand up. If somebody had walked into that yard at ten in the morning in November and told him those four lines were false, he would have set down the maul and told them no. Not argued it, not defended it with anything he could have written on paper. Just no. Those four are true and I am not moving off them.

He picked the locust back up and swung. The oak went on stacking, tight against the shed wall, one row against the last. And under it, all the way to noon, the four lines went round again, because they were what he had and they were carrying the morning.

By the time the tarp went back over, he was not grieving what he could not remember.

He was standing on what he could.

Short is not the same as thin

There is a difference between a small house and a ruined one, and nobody in a hurry can tell them apart from the road.

The fear underneath a short list is not really about the length. It is that the shortness is evidence. Evidence of drift, of laziness, of a slow leak somewhere you cannot find, of being the kind of person whose faith got thin while other people's got thick. So the honest thing feels like a confession instead of an inventory.

David counted low, and he counted out loud, and there is not one apology in it.

He only is my rock and my salvation; he is my defence; I shall not be greatly moved.Psalm 62:2

Look at how little is in that sentence. One rock. One salvation. One defense. That is a man with almost nothing on his list, saying it flat, in public, in a psalm the people sang.

So take this where you are sitting. You have a foundation under you that you did not lay and cannot lose track of. That is what Psalm 62 puts in writing, and the Holy Spirit moved David to write it small instead of long, and the same Spirit is steadying you while you read the size of your own list. What is under you is a rock. The rock is not measured by how much you can say about it.

Now, what belongs on your list is not mine to tell you. That is not modesty on my part, it is the whole point. A list somebody hands you is a list you are borrowing, and the day it costs something you will find out you were holding a receipt instead of a deed. Yours has to be yours.

What I will tell you is what load-bearing means, because that is the word doing the work here. In a house, a load-bearing wall is not the prettiest wall, and it is usually not the one anybody comments on. It is the one you cannot take out. You find out which walls are load-bearing by asking what happens if this goes, and if the answer is the roof, then you have found one.

You have already been through that test. You did not sit down and choose four lines, and neither did Dale. The years took a wall out, and another, and the ones still standing are the ones the roof is on. His word calls that a foundation and not a remnant, and it is His Spirit and not your effort holding those few in place while everything around them went quiet.

I want to say something about the quiet, because I think that is the harder half.

When a thing gets short, the room around it gets loud with the missing. You do not just have four lines, you have four lines and the sound of the fifth not being there. That silence is not a verdict on you. It is a silence. Heaven does not read it the way you read it at ten in the morning with a maul in your hand, and the Holy Spirit is not weighing it as evidence against you.

And nobody here is telling you that your list got short because you did not have enough faith. That is a lie and it never had any standing. Lists get short in the lives of people who love God with everything in them, and Psalm 62 was written by one of them.

You are held right now by the few things you can still say, because the holding was never coming from the count. Scripture says He only is my rock, and the word only is the shortest list in the whole psalm. The Holy Spirit put that word there, and He has not stopped saying it over you since.

A short list is not a virtue either, and nobody here is going to flatter you into thinking you have arrived at something clean and simple by losing things. Losing is losing. Some of what went, you will miss, and missing it is honest. But what is standing is standing, and it is holding weight this morning, and that is not nothing. That is a floor.