The Field He Has Not Walked Yet

The deed came through in February and Merle has stood at that gate about forty times since and has not once walked to the far end.

Eleven acres. It was part of a settlement, and the settlement was the end of a long arrangement in his wife's family that had held him and her both for nineteen years, and how it ended is not this article's business except to say that it ended and everybody involved thinks it ended right.

He goes out most evenings. He parks on the track, he gets out, he stands at the gate with his hands on the top rail, and he looks at it.

He has walked maybe forty yards in. Never further.

He is fifty-eight. He worked other men's ground his whole life and was good at it and never had an acre with his name on it until February.

If you asked him why he does not walk it he would look at you like the question is odd, and then he would think about it, and then he would not have an answer.

Here is the evening it caught.

His son, home for a weekend, came out with him and did what a thirty-year-old does, which is to climb the gate and start walking. And he got about two hundred yards out and turned around and shouted, "There's a spring down here, did you know that?"

And Merle said, "No."

And his son said, "You've had this since February."

And Merle stood at that gate with his hands on the rail and did not go down and look at the spring on his own ground.

You know that. Something is yours, properly yours, and you have been standing at the edge of it for months, and if somebody asked you why you would not be able to tell them.

The giving is in the past tense

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you what to do with eleven acres. I do not know your ground, your county or your knees. I am not going to give you a verdict on the family or the settlement, and I am not going to tell you what God is going to make of that field, because I do not know that and inventing it would be cheap.

What I will do is read you one sentence God said to a man standing at the edge of something, and point at the tense of the verb.

Every place that the sole of your foot shall tread upon, that have I given unto you, as I said unto Moses.Joshua 1:3

That have I given unto you.

Past tense. Completed. Before Joshua has taken one step, before the river, before Jericho, the giving is spoken of as a thing that has already happened.

That is a strange sentence if you read it as a transaction. It sounds like the walking causes the giving. It does not. Read it again: the giving is stated as accomplished, and the treading is described as the future thing that catches up to it.

You are standing at the edge of ground that has already been given, and the deed was done before the walking. Joshua 1:3 puts the giving in the perfect tense and the treading in the future, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a man's hands on a gate rail.

And notice the second half of the verse. As I said unto Moses. The whole thing is being carried forward from a conversation Joshua was not the main party to. He is inheriting a promise made to somebody else, and the promise did not weaken in the handover.

You have inherited something that was settled elsewhere, and the settling did not depend on you being present for it. It is written that the giving was as He had said unto Moses, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an inherited promise a present possession.

Standing at the gate is not doubt

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Somebody would tell Merle that not walking the field is a lack of faith. That he needs to claim it. That there is a spiritual failure in a man who stands at a gate.

That is not what is happening and I am not going to say it is.

A man who worked other men's ground for forty years knows exactly how to walk a field. What he does not know how to do is walk one that is his, because he has never once done it, and the body does not have a procedure for a thing it has never done.

You are not failing to believe anything, and what is missing is practice rather than faith. Joshua 1:3 gives the ground first and expects the treading afterward, which is the order of somebody who understands that people arrive at things gradually, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a slow arrival legitimate.

And here is the other thing under it, and it is the one that would take longest to say out loud.

For nineteen years, in that arrangement, nothing was ever fully his. There was always a claim on it, or a condition, or somebody who could revisit it. A man who lived like that develops a habit of not putting his weight on things.

The gate is not fear of the field. It is a man who has learned not to lean.

You have been holding back your own weight out of long practice rather than out of unbelief, and Scripture never once reproaches a person for the shape their history put them in. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a learned caution from being weighed as a spiritual fault.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the nineteen years left something you have never looked at squarely, or if the evenings at that gate have gone somewhere heavier than quiet, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your wife, your son, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about that family. That is me refusing to leave you standing at that gate on your own.