Nothing Above the Soil

Thirty people in a back garden on a Saturday in June, and he is the one up the stepladder.

He volunteered for the lights. He always volunteers for the lights, or the chairs, or the ice, because there is a kind of man who would rather be slightly outside the middle of a room with a job in his hands, and he has been that man for four years without once choosing it. Somebody is on the barbecue and losing. Somebody's dog has got in among the crisps. The evening sun comes in low over the fence at exactly the wrong angle, so he is working half blind with three cable clips in his teeth.

From the top of a ladder you can see a whole garden at once, which is how he happens to be looking straight at her when it happens. She is out on the grass with a glass in one hand and somebody's mother holding the other, and the party has turned toward her, and this is the evening for the thing that finally came after eleven years.

And you are glad. Get that straight before anything else, because it is true and nobody is taking it off you: you were properly, uncomplicatedly glad. You clapped. You meant all of it.

You also stayed up that ladder about four minutes longer than the lights needed.

Nobody noticed, because there was nothing to notice. You clipped a clip that did not need clipping, straightened a run that was already straight, kept your face toward the fence. What was in you was not envy. You would have known what to do with envy. It was one flat sentence you would never say out loud in that garden.

Hers came up.

And behind it, arriving before you could stop it, the question that does the actual damage. So what is different about my ground?

The part of the build nobody photographs

Take that question off the table first, because it has been doing quiet work in you for years and it has no standing at all.

Her ground coming up is not a verdict on yours. There is no list somewhere on which she came out ahead of you, no threshold she cleared and you did not. What came up in that garden after eleven years was given, exactly as yours was given, and no part of it was earned into being. You cannot read your own ground off somebody else's.

Underneath that question is another one, and it is the one you actually carry.

Did I make it up?

Almost nobody says that out loud, so let it be said here. It is not the waiting that has worn you down. Waiting is survivable. What has worn you down is the suspicion that you have spent six years being faithful to something you invented, and that everyone in that garden would be gentle about it if they knew, which is somehow worse than if they laughed. Scripture already said it in Isaiah 55:10-11, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

Because you did not make it up. That is the part nobody down on the grass knows. You did not decide it, or want it into being, or read it somewhere and adopt it. It was given to you, in a March six years ago, and for the whole of the first year you never wrote it down, because it did not occur to you that anything that clear could go faint. You wrote it down in the second year. Not because you had started to doubt it. Because you had started to be frightened that you were losing the exact words. Scripture settles that in Isaiah 55:10-11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

So look at how this actually works.

For as the rain cometh down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the sower, and bread to the eater: So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it.Isaiah 55:10-11

Read the traffic in that. Everything moves one way, and it is not the way you have been trained to worry about. The rain comes down. The word goes out. The seed is given to the sower, before the sower has anything to sow, so it was never the sower's own production. It was issued to him. And the accomplishing belongs start to finish to the One who sent it out of His mouth, which is all that word prosper is doing there: an errand succeeding, a word doing the thing it was sent to do. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Isaiah 55:10-11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

Which settles something you have been quietly carrying. This did not begin because you were good enough at anything, and it has not stalled because of anything you failed to do. You did not manufacture it. It was put into your hands, and He has never once asked you to be its source. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Isaiah 55:10-11, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

Now the second thing, and it is the one you came here for.

Ask any builder and he will tell you that the longest phase of a build is the phase in which a person driving past sees a hole. Excavation, footings, drainage, the pour, then weeks of nothing at all while concrete cures on its own clock and will not be hurried by anybody wanting it. There is a photograph of the ground breaking and a photograph of the finished house, and between them sits the part nobody photographs, which is also the part every other part stands on. A neighbor passing that site every morning for four months would be entitled to say nothing is happening there. He would be describing the surface accurately and he would be wrong about the site.

Nothing above the soil is a description of a surface. It has never once been a report on a seed.

A prophet once stood on his watchtower and complained, in almost the words you would use, that he had been given something and nothing had come of it. He was not told to be patient. He was told to write the vision and make it plain on tablets, so a man running past could read it, and then he was told that the vision has an appointed time, and that though it seems to delay, it is not delaying (Habakkuk 2:2-3).

Hear what is in that. An appointed time sits on a calendar. That calendar is not yours, He has not published it, and nobody honest will hand you a date for your ground. But a thing with an appointed time is not a thing that has been mislaid.

And notice what he was told to do in the meantime: write it down and keep it legible. You already did that, in year two, frightened, in your own handwriting. That was not you losing your nerve. That was obedience you did not know you were performing. Scripture holds that ground in Isaiah 55:10-11, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.