Ground That Will Not Look The Same

She did not mean to stop. She was coming back from a hospital appointment for somebody else and she took the long way round because the bypass was slow, and then she was at the top of the lane and she pulled into the gateway.

There is a sign at the end now with a different name on it. Good sign. Routed letters, proper posts, the sort of thing they used to say they would get round to.

The yard is tidy. That is the part she cannot get past. In her mind it is still the yard with the drum by the gate and the twine and the bit of blue rope on the latch, and instead it is tidy, and it is somebody's, and it is fine.

Four years. She can still tell you the morning. The lorry came at seven and it was done by half nine and the whole thing was quieter than she had braced for. The men were decent about it. One of them said sorry, love, at the tailgate, and then the ramp went up and the yard was quiet in a way a yard is never quiet, and she went in and put the kettle on because there was nothing else in the world to do with her hands.

Her grandfather's initials are on the beam in the barn. She has never gone back to see whether they left them.

Four years is different from four weeks and nobody tells you how. At four weeks people bring things. At four years everybody has a version of you that has moved on and it would be unkind to correct it. She has a job now with a lanyard and a car park space and she is good at it. She sends birthday cards. She is, by every visible measure, all right.

And she is sitting in a gateway at the top of a lane with the engine running, looking at somebody else's tidy yard.

At church they keep saying it will all come back to her. Pressed down, shaken together, running over. They say it with such warmth and she nods and she says amen because what else does a person say, and then she drives home thinking: I do not believe that. I do not think the land is coming back and I do not think anybody had the right to promise me it was.

Maybe that is where you are. Years out, functioning, sat in a gateway you did not plan to stop in, holding a verse somebody handed you that does not fit the ground you are looking at.

Say what the word means before anybody offers it to you

There is a word over this whole site and I would rather correct it than let it work on you quietly.

Abundance is not the acreage back. It is not the same stock in the same shed under your name again, and it is not a bigger farm somewhere else as a swap. And it is not money, which is what the word sounds like and what a good many people mean by it. Abundance is fullness of life, which is what the Shepherd actually said He came to bring.

You have that already, four years out, in a gateway, in a car with a lanyard on the passenger seat. It is written in John 10 rather than in anything I have decided about you, and the Holy Spirit carries a sentence like that into a woman who has stopped believing sentences.

That is the meaning. It does not change further down the page.

What Isaiah actually says, and what he does not

Here is the verse the whole site is named out of, and I want to read it plainly rather than warmly.

To give them beauty for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness, that they might be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord.Isaiah 61:3

Read what is there. Oaks. Planting. The planting of the Lord.

Now read what is not there. There is no clause that says the oak will be the tree that burnt. There is no promise that the new planting is a copy, or that it stands on the same ground, or that it arrives on a schedule anybody can hold Him to. Isaiah says God plants. He does not say God rewinds.

So I am not going to tell you the land is coming back, because Isaiah does not say that and I will not put a forecast in your hands and call it Scripture. I am also not going to tell you the new thing will be better than the farm. That sentence gets said constantly on ground like this and it is cruel, because it asks a woman to grade her grandfather's beam against something she has not seen.

You were never asked to make those two things balance. What is written is that God plants, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes new growth in a person real rather than theoretical, and none of that requires you to say the loss was worth it.

Growth does not close the grief

I want to be careful here, because this is the category where pages usually cheat.

New life coming up is not a lid. It does not close the yard, it does not settle the argument, it does not mean the grief is finished and may now be put away. Plenty of things grow in a person who is still grieving, at the same time, in the same week. Both are real. Neither cancels the other.

So when I say something is growing, I do not mean the ache has been dealt with. I mean that God has not been idle in you for four years, and that a great deal of what He has grown does not look like a farm and was never going to.

You have been planted by Him, and that is Isaiah 61 speaking rather than a hopeful thing I am saying to move you along, and His Spirit is the one who does the growing without waiting for the ground to stop hurting.

The unimpressive list

Here is what growth actually looks like at four years, and none of it will sound like much.

Being around someone else's good news is possible again. That was not true at one point. The lane can be driven past. There is a kindness in there now for people going through it that was not there before and that nobody would have asked to buy at this price. Prayer has got shorter and more honest. There is a patience with slow things. Somebody rings when it goes wrong for them, and they did not use to.

That list is small and I am not inflating it. But it is life, it is up, and it is in ground that will never look the way it did.

You have real growth in you right now, and it is not a consolation prize handed over because the land was unavailable. Scripture calls that planting the work of the Lord Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does it quietly in people who are not watching for it.