Primer Over The Lettering

The sign at the bottom of Cutler Lane was cedar, and Ray Dunbar cut it out of a windfall tree the spring he turned thirty four. He planed the face smooth on a tailgate that did not survive to see the job finished. Two coats of white. Then the lettering in a red he mixed himself out of a quart can with a stir stick, standing back, adding, standing back again, until it matched the barn within a shade.

The word he painted there named what he was. Six inch letters, set where the mail carrier could read them going by at forty, and where anybody who slowed at the county road would know, before the gravel even started, what kind of house sat up at the top of it.

He touched it up every other April for thirty years. He knew the exact place on the second letter where water got in behind the paint, and he knew the trick for it, which was to let the wood dry three full days after a rain and then feather the edge instead of cutting a hard line.

This past April he stood at the bottom of that lane with a roller tray on the ground and rolled primer over the lettering. Not paint. Primer. Thin, gray, and it took two passes, because red bleeds, and he knew that too.

He did not do it angry. That is the part people want to know first and it is not the part that matters. He did it because the word had quit fitting in his mouth, and a man does not like something standing six inches tall out on the road that he can no longer say at his own kitchen table without going quiet in the middle of it.

Then he put the roller in a grocery bag, picked up the tray, and started back up the gravel. He got about halfway and stopped, because he could not tell any more what he was walking home as.

So he turned around and looked at it a while before he went in.

The boards were still there. Four of them, cedar, mortised into two posts he had set in concrete below the frost line that same year. Primer covers a face. It does not pull a post. Every single thing that had ever held that sign up was still holding it up right then, in the same dirt, doing the same work it had done through thirty winters, whether or not there was one readable word left on the front of it.

The mail carrier still knew the house. The neighbor with the hay still turned in at the same gravel. And the One who had been meeting Ray in that lane at first light for thirty years had never once come up it reading a sign.

The knowing runs the other way

Jesus said a sentence about shepherds that gets read at funerals and almost never gets read as a legal fact. He said He is the good shepherd, that He knows His sheep, and that He is known of His own. Read the order of it before you read the comfort in it. He knows first. The sheep's knowing comes second in the sentence because it comes second in life, and nobody in that verse is asked to produce identification at the gate.

You are known this morning, standing in front of a gray rectangle with nothing readable on it, and that is not a kind thing I am saying to soften a hard spring. It is what is set down in John 10:14. He said it once through John, and His Spirit has never stopped saying it; the same Spirit who laid that line down is carrying it up the gravel to you while you read it. Being known by Him has never once depended on your being able to say what you are.

I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine.John 10:14

A shepherd in that country kept no registry. The sheep wore no nameplate and no tag. Two flocks watered at the same well in the heat of the day and mixed together, and separating them again was not paperwork and not argument. It was a voice. One man walked off making the same sound he had made every day of their lives, and his own came up out of the mixture and followed him, because the knowing had been running both directions for years and neither of them had ever written a word of it down anywhere.

You have not lost the thing. You lost the word for the thing, and those are not the same loss, whatever this spring has felt like. What is written in 2 Timothy 2:19 is that the Lord knows them that are His, and it is His Spirit who seals that and not your vocabulary, so the foundation named in that verse is standing under you at this minute exactly as steady as it stood when the lettering was still red.

Now hear the other half, because it matters and it is not a small thing. The word you painted was a good word. It was reaching for something true, and men and women poured their lives out under it and meant every hour of it. Nothing here is against that word and nothing here is against the house it came from. What is being handed back to you is the thing the word was reaching for, and the news is that it is still here and it is still yours.

You were His underneath the word, before the sign, when you were young and had almost nothing to say about any of it. He promised in Isaiah 43:1 that He calls His own by name and that they belong to Him, and it is the same Spirit standing over that promise this morning who stood over it then. Nothing about you got returned when the lettering went under.

I am not going to hand you a new word. That is the obvious move and it is the wrong one, because a word you go out and get is a word you can lose again, and I am not putting you in line for another spring like the last one. Nobody here is asking you what happened to the old one either. You do not owe this page an account of it.

There is a shorter sentence available, and it has been in Scripture the whole time. A blind man who had just been given his eyes and had already been put out of everything he belonged to said two words in John 9:38. Lord, I believe. That was the entire statement. He did not append a position to it. You have a complete sentence sitting in your mouth right now, and what makes it carry is the Holy Spirit, exactly as He carried it for that man on the day he had nothing else left to say.