Five Dry Years on the Ridge Road

You have a way of answering now and it took about two years to settle into.

Somebody at the counter says, how are you getting on up there, and you say, we are getting on. That is the whole sentence. It has the shape of an answer and none of the content, and men who have farmed a while recognize it and let it go past, which is a mercy of a sort.

Five years. Not a disaster in any of them. That is the thing nobody understands from the outside. A disaster gets a name and a grant and a paragraph in the paper. This is five years of a little less, five years of a bill met by moving something else, five years of the ridge road looking the same in July as it does in April.

You stopped saying it out loud in the third year because of the face. You know the face. It starts as sympathy and turns into calculation about halfway through, and you can watch a man work out how long you have got while he is still nodding.

So now you say, we are getting on.

You still walk the top field most evenings. That has not changed since your father. You go up the ridge road at seven with the dog and you stand at the gate and you look at it, and you are not exactly praying, and you are not exactly not.

The prophet counted the losses out loud first

There is a passage at the end of Habakkuk that people quote the second half of and skip the inventory.

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

Count what he lists. Fig, vine, olive, field, flock, herd. Six of them, one after another, and he does not soften a single one or explain any of it away.

That is not a man pretending. That is a man doing exactly what you do at the gate at seven, standing in front of the whole of it and naming it.

And then, on the far side of a full accounting, he says yet.

You are allowed to say the whole inventory out loud before you say anything hopeful. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture puts six named losses in before it puts one word of joy, Habakkuk 3:17, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man be that honest without it costing him his footing.

We are not going to explain five years

I will not do it, and I want to be plain about why.

I have known men who were handed a reason for a thin decade by somebody who had never held a lease. It is always the same shape. There is a lesson in this. God is refining you. There is a door opening somewhere else. All of it delivered by a man on his way to somewhere warm.

Scripture does not do that to Habakkuk. God's actual answer to him, earlier in the book, is not an explanation. It is a promise that the vision speaks at the end and does not lie, and an instruction to write it down and keep it legible.

So no reason from me. Not a season with a purpose you have to accept, not a discipline, not a refining you are somewhere in the middle of. Scripture is willing to leave a hard stretch unexplained, Habakkuk 1:2, and the Holy Spirit does not require a farmer to have understood a thing before He will stand at a gate with him.

You are not being corrected by this ground. You are in the fifth year, and God is on the ridge road at seven.

What the counter costs

Here is what five years actually did, and it is not in the accounts.

It made you private. It took a man who told the truth to his neighbors and turned him into a man who says we are getting on to people he has known since school.

That was self-protection, and it was reasonable, and it worked. Scripture does not scold a man for it, Proverbs 12:25, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over that decision. It also cost you something. Nobody at that counter now knows how the top field looks, and nobody knows what you are carrying up the ridge road at seven, and being unknown by your own people for three years is its own kind of dry.

I am not going to tell you to stand up at the co-op and make a speech. That is not how men do it and it is not necessary.

But one man. One who has known you a long time, who would not do the face. Tell him how the fields actually look.

You have not been asked to carry this alone. Scripture says two are better than one, for if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, Ecclesiastes 4:9-10, and the Holy Spirit did not write that verse for everybody except the man who owns the top field.

The ground and the man

There is a thing that happens in a long thin stretch that goes past arithmetic.

The land stops being a thing you farm and becomes a report on you. Your father held it through worse. His father broke the ridge road out of nothing with a horse. And here you are in the fifth year saying we are getting on at a counter.

Pull those apart, because Scripture never joined them, Psalm 24:1, and the Holy Spirit has not been grading you off a ridge. The ground is soil, weather and a market, and none of the three has ever been a scorecard on a man.

You are not what five thin years say you are. Scripture says the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof, Psalm 24:1, and the Holy Spirit does not read a man's worth off a yield.

And this ridge is not a spirit, and it is not against you. It is the Creator's handiwork, and it does what it does under His hand, and it has no verdict in it at all.