The Strip You Kept

Eleven feet. That is the width of it, and Hollis Barnhart can tell you to the inch, because he took a tape out there one Saturday in June and walked it off, just to know the number he was dealing with.

It runs from the county road back to a survey pin buried in honeysuckle, three hundred and forty feet, on the far side of the ditch. When the place sold, the buyer wanted nothing on the far side of that ditch, and the lawyer said it was cheaper to leave it in his name than to argue over it, and so it stayed. Eleven by three hundred and forty. A quarter acre, less a little.

The rest of it went. He is not going to itemize it for you and you should not ask. Some of it he lost, some of it he let go of, one piece of it he handed over on purpose with both hands, and the accounting on which was which is his own and he has made his peace with about two thirds of it so far.

There is no drive to the strip. He parks on the shoulder. He crosses at the flat place where a piece of culvert pipe has been lying since before any of this happened, and he walks it, road end to pin, which takes him under two minutes at the pace he keeps now.

Then he stands there.

That is the whole activity. He stands at the pin end and looks back down eleven feet of grass toward the road, and from there he can see every acre of what used to be his, all of it at once, which is the hard part and is also, in a way he has never been able to say out loud to anybody, exactly the point.

In August the honeysuckle takes the back end and you cannot find the pin without kicking around for it. In February you can see it from the road.

The question he carried out there with him in June, the one he has never once asked another living soul, is not whether any of it comes back. He is a grown man and he knows how a deed works and he is not standing out there waiting on a miracle in the county records.

The question is whether eleven feet counts as standing somewhere.

Because a man can be up on his feet, on ground that is legally his, and still not be able to say honestly that he has a place. And three or four times now Hollis has caught himself using the word was about himself in ordinary conversation, at the parts counter, at a funeral, and every time it has gone through him like cold water out of a hose.

Habakkuk counted it out loud

At the end of his book, a prophet does something almost nobody does, which is to say the whole loss out loud, item by item, before he says anything hopeful.

The fig tree does not blossom. There is no fruit on the vines. The olive crop fails. The fields yield nothing. The flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls. Six things. He names them one at a time, in order, which is what a man does when he has actually been out there and counted, not when he is speaking in generalities about hard times.

And then he turns the whole thing on one word. Yet.

You are standing on ground a prophet already surveyed, and he wrote down the number honestly before he said one word about joy. That is what Habakkuk 3:17 does. The whole inventory stayed in the text instead of being trimmed down to the encouraging part, because His Spirit wanted it there, and He is holding that verse under a man on eleven feet of grass this morning.

Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines; the labour of the olive shall fail, and the fields shall yield no meat; the flock shall be cut off from the fold, and there shall be no herd in the stalls: Yet I will rejoice in the LORD, I will joy in the God of my salvation.Habakkuk 3:17-18

Now read what is on the other side of that yet, because this is where nearly everybody adds something the prophet did not say.

He does not say the trees blossom again next year. He does not say the herd comes back into the stalls. He does not promise himself one head of livestock. What is on the other side of the yet is not an inventory at all. It is a Person, and the sentence ends there, on purpose, and it has held up for twenty six centuries ending exactly where it ends.

So let me say plainly what this page is not going to do, and it is not going to do it on purpose.

Nobody here is going to tell you it grows back. I do not know that. Anybody who says it to you from a distance is spending something that costs him nothing, and you have had enough of that. And nobody here is going to hand you the small one as a stage, a phase, a chapter in a book about the bigger thing coming later. Eleven feet is eleven feet. What this page has to say about eleven feet is that it holds.

You have ground under you right now that is bearing your entire weight, and the size of it was never what made it ground. Psalm 18:36 says He enlarged my steps under me, that my feet did not slip, and nobody has ever stayed upright on a narrow place by concentrating harder. His Spirit does that, and He is doing it while you read this. That footing is already settled in you.

Habakkuk finishes with a picture worth having in your hand out there. He says the Lord God is his strength, and that his feet are made like hinds' feet, and that he walks on high places. A deer stands on a ledge four inches wide on the side of a mountain, and stands there the way you and I stand in a kitchen, and nobody watching it has ever thought, that poor animal, look how little it has to work with.

Narrow is not the same thing as unsafe. You were never promised acreage. What is written in Deuteronomy 33:27 is that underneath are the everlasting arms, and the word underneath is the whole of it, and the Spirit who put that line in the last blessing of an old man is under you at this minute, on the strip, at the pin, in whatever room this finds you in.

And the word was has to go. You are not a man who used to be somebody. Ephesians 2:19 says you are no more a stranger and a foreigner but a fellow citizen, and it is written in the present tense about people who had lost a great deal, and it is His Spirit who makes a present tense stay present. That word has no right to stay in your mouth.