The Dog Still Gets Up

He pulls in on the verge because there is nowhere else to pull in, and he does not get out.

The gate is the same gate. Same latch, same rust on the same hinge, same dip in the ground where the tractor always came through and made the puddle that never dried. The sign on the post is new. It is a good sign, properly made, and it has somebody else's name on it, and he reads it every time the way you press a bruise.

Seven months. Three generations before him and then him, and the whole thing went in a morning: the sheep up the ramp in one lorry, the ewes calling, the dog going frantic in the back of the pickup because nobody had explained any of it to him. Somebody bought the tups. Somebody else took the trailer away on a Sunday and did not look at him while he did it.

He works in town now, at a builders merchant, and he is good at it, and the men there are kind to him. Nobody has asked about the farm since about February. That is right. That is what should happen. People cannot keep asking.

The bungalow they rent has a back door and a bit of gravel, and at half past four every afternoon the dog gets up off the mat and goes and stands at that door and waits. Every day. Seven months of days. He does not want anything, he wants to go and do the thing they did at half past four, and there is no thing, and he stands there anyway until somebody gets up and rubs his ears and tells him no.

That is the part he cannot say to anybody. Not the land, not the sign, not the sale. The dog getting up.

He sits in the van on the verge for eleven minutes and then he drives on into town for a box of screws.

Maybe that is where you are. Not in the crisis, because the crisis finished, but in the long ordinary afternoon after it, where the thing that undoes you is small and stupid and nobody would understand it, and everybody else has quite properly gone back to their own lives.

The word on the sign outside this page

Before anything else I want to take a word off you, because the name of this site sounds like a promise about a bank and it is not one.

On a farm, abundance is a word about a yield. It means the year the grass came, the year everything took. So when somebody hands you that word now, your head goes straight to acreage and to money, and there is none of either, and the word lands like a joke told badly. Take it off the land for a minute. Abundance is not money and it is not acres. It is fullness of life, and that is the whole of it.

I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.John 10:10

Life is the noun. Everything else in the sentence is describing how much of it. Over the brim, more than there was, and not weighed against what a man managed to hold on to.

You have that, and it is not a smaller thing offered because the real thing is gone. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own voice, and the Holy Spirit gets a sentence like that through seven months of numbness and into a man sitting in a van.

Seven months is its own country

Nothing I have written puts one sheep back through that gate, and I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a tidy paragraph.

Seven months is a strange distance. At three weeks people bring things round. At seven months you're the man who used to farm, said kindly, in the past tense, by people who mean well, and the asking has stopped because life carries on and it is nobody's fault that it does.

And I will not tell you there was a reason behind it. Not that some purpose required it, not that a lesson is folded up in it, not that the ground went in order to teach you something. Those sentences are available and they are comfortable and they are false, and I am not handing you one while you're sitting on a verge.

You are met here. Not lifted out, not hurried along, not handed a better view of it. Met, in the van, on the verge, at the gate. Psalm 34 says the Lord is near to the broken hearted and saves the crushed in spirit, and near is a word about where a Person is standing rather than a word about progress, and it is His Spirit who makes near into something a numb man can actually feel.

Near is a word about a Person

There is a version of comfort that is really a shove. It agrees with you for two sentences and then starts moving you along, because grief is uncomfortable to sit beside. God does not do that. The whole of that psalm is a man in trouble being come near to, not a man in trouble being coached.

You have been come near to, and it happened without you managing anything at all. Psalm 34 puts God's nearness on the side of the crushed rather than the side of the recovered, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that nearness into a rented bungalow with gravel outside it and a dog at the door.

Notice what nearness is not. It is not an explanation, and nobody in that psalm gets told why. It is not a schedule either. What is given is a Person, present, down on the floor of it, and for a man who has been alone with this since February that turns out to be the thing that was actually missing.

What fullness looks like at half past four

So what does fullness mean here, if it is not the farm and not money.

It means being able to feel something other than flat. It means the day you notice the light on the hills on the way to work and it does not immediately turn into a knife. It means being in a room with people again. It means sleeping through. It means praying in ordinary sentences instead of negotiating. It means being loved while producing nothing at all, which is a thing most people never learn and nobody would choose this way of learning it.

You are held exactly where you are, and nobody is rushing you out of it. That is not my sentiment, it is the plain shape of Psalm 34, written down long before there was a lorry ramp or a builders merchant, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old line reach a man on a verge.

You were not left. Seven months of afternoons and not one of them happened without Him in the room, and I am not asking you to have felt that, because Psalm 34 puts the nearness on God's side of the sentence and not on yours, and His Spirit is the witness to it whether or not the feeling ever arrived.