The Posts You Left In The Ground

By the last week of February there were nineteen of them stacked by the gate, and every one had come out of the ground the same way, which is to say without a fight.

Della Vance had walked her north line all winter with a fence bar, a bad hip, and a method she invented on the second day. She put both hands flat on the top of a post and leaned. Not a shove. A lean. The whole weight of her, the way a person leans on something they actually intend to trust.

A sound post does not move. That is the whole test. It takes your weight and hands you back one small blunt refusal, and you say all right and go on to the next one.

A rotten post goes soft. It does not snap. It gives two inches and then keeps on giving, and you feel the ground let go around it, and when you set the bar to it the thing comes up in two pieces with the bottom half still down in the hole, black and light as a sponge, and you get that part out with your hands.

Nineteen of them. Out of forty one.

She had not gone out there to do the fence. She went out in December to rehang a gate, and the gate post moved when she pulled on it, and she stood there a while and then started walking the line, because once you know that about one post you cannot go back in the house.

Some of the nineteen hurt. There was one her husband set. There were four she remembered helping tamp when she was a girl, in a jacket too big for her, holding the post plumb while somebody else swung. The wood does not know any of that. Wood in the ground for thirty years is either sound or it is not, and no amount of what it meant to you changes what it does when you lean.

Then there was the corner down where the line turns toward the creek, on a Thursday near the end of it, and three in a row that did not move.

Not one of the three was pretty. One of them is the ugliest post on that place: a mismatch, a leftover, not even the same wood as the rest, set by somebody before her time who evidently had it lying around and used it. She put both hands on it and leaned with everything she had, and it gave her back that same blunt refusal, and she stood in the mud at that corner and cried for a minute, which surprised her considerably.

Twenty two still standing out of forty one. She had assumed she would be ashamed of the number.

Standing at that corner with her hands still flat on the ugly one, what she felt was not shame, and she did not have a word for it that day either.

What a tested stone is for

There is a line in Isaiah where God says what He is doing about a people whose confidences have come apart in their hands. He does not hand them a better argument. He lays a stone.

Read what He calls it, because every word in the list is doing work. A tried stone. A precious corner stone. A sure foundation. Tried means tested, and tested means somebody leaned on it before you got there and it did not move, and the testing is why it can be called sure.

You are standing on something that was tested before it was ever offered to you. That is what Isaiah 28:16 says, and the Holy Spirit put the word tried in that sentence rather than the word new, and He is the same Spirit standing that verse under your feet at this minute. Twenty two posts did not become sound because you leaned on them. They were sound, and your leaning found it out.

Behold, I lay in Zion for a foundation a stone, a tried stone, a precious corner stone, a sure foundation: he that believeth shall not make haste.Isaiah 28:16

He that believeth shall not make haste. The Hebrew behind that has the flavor of a man who does not have to run, does not have to scramble, is not in a panic. It is the posture of somebody who has quit checking. And you only ever get there one way, which is by having leaned.

Now the hard sentence, and I mean it: what belongs on your list is not coming from me. Not one item of it. Not a suggested minimum, not a starter set, not four things everybody ought to have. A post somebody else sets for you is a post you would have to walk out and test yourself anyway, and you have already had one winter of that.

What is written in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 is to prove all things and hold fast that which is good, and the proving is given to you and not performed on your behalf. It is His Spirit who steadies a person through that kind of winter, and He has been doing it in yours. You were not being reckless out there. You were being obedient, and you probably had no idea.

Hear this part slowly, because everyone gets it backward in one direction or the other. Twenty two is not a score. Neither is three. There is no target number in this, and nobody here is going to admire you for a short list or console you for a long one, because both of those responses would be a stranger grading a fence he has never walked.

You have what took your weight, and what took your weight is the definition of what holds. Hebrews 12:27 talks about a shaking that removes what can be shaken so that what cannot be shaken remains, and the word for the remainder in that passage is not remnant or leftover. The remaining is the point of the shaking, and the Spirit who put that line down has been out on the north line with you all winter.

And the ugly one at the corner deserves saying out loud. Some of what held is not impressive. It is mismatched, it came from somewhere you cannot fully account for, somebody before your time set it and you would not have chosen it. Lean on it anyway. Soundness is not a matter of appearance and never has been, and the stone in Isaiah was refused by builders who were professionals.