The Year the Fields Finally Came In

The trailer went up the lane eleven times and you counted every one of them, and not for the reason a man is supposed to count.

It came in. Properly. The best since 2019, and better than that if you are honest, and the men at the co-op counter said so and meant it and shook your hand.

You should be sitting in the kitchen tonight with your boots off feeling something.

Instead you have walked up to the gate at seven, the way you have walked up to that gate every evening for as long as anybody can remember, and you are standing there looking at cleared ground in good light and doing arithmetic.

2020. 2021. 2022. 2023. 2024. 2025.

Six.

Six years of standing at this gate. Six years of we are getting on. Six years of the machinery going one more season, and the conversation with the bank in the March of the third year, and your wife going back to two days a week at the surgery and never once making it a thing.

And now it has come in, and what you feel at the gate is not gladness. It is something closer to a bill arriving. As though the good year has quietly presented you with an invoice for six years of being told to hold on, and now everybody expects the account to be settled and the whole thing to be described as worth it.

The verse people quote and the half they leave off

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that gets put on things, and the second half of it is the important one.

He hath made every thing beautiful in his time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.Ecclesiastes 3:11

The first half is the comfort. The second half is the honesty, and it is stronger.

No man can find out the work. That is not a lament in the text, it is a plain statement of the human position. You are not able to see the whole shape of what God is doing, from the beginning to the end, and Ecclesiastes says so without apologizing for it.

The Holy Spirit does not hold that against a man, and Scripture states it as the ordinary human condition, Ecclesiastes 8:17. Which means this: you are not required to produce an account of the six years. Nobody is. The book that says everything is beautiful in its time says in the same breath that you cannot see the pattern, and those two are not in tension, they are the same sentence.

You are not obliged to explain your own lean years to anybody. I am not putting my own opinion over you. Scripture says no man can find out the work that God makes from the beginning to the end, Ecclesiastes 3:11, and the Holy Spirit does not require a farmer to produce a summary before He will stand at a gate with him.

Nobody gets to call them worth it except you

I want to say this as plainly as I know how.

Somebody will say it this month. Probably several people, and they will mean it kindly. It was all worth it in the end. And every time they say it, something in you is going to go still, and you will not be able to say why.

Here is why. That judgement is yours. It belongs to the man who stood at this gate for six years and to nobody else on this earth, and when a person says it on your behalf they have taken the only thing those years left you with, which is the right to decide what they were.

So I will not say it. I do not know whether it was worth it. Neither does the man at the counter, and neither, with respect, does your brother.

You are the only one with standing to weigh those years, and you may take as long as you like. Scripture lets Job say his own piece about his own suffering across whole chapters, Job 3:1-3, and the Holy Spirit did not once cut him off with a summary.

The good year is not a payment

Here is the thing that has your chest tight at a gate in the best light of the year.

You have started treating the harvest as a settlement. As though God ran an account, and the six years went in one column, and this year has gone in the other, and the books now balance and everybody can move on.

That is not how any of it works, and it is a cruel arithmetic to be doing on yourself. Scripture keeps gift and endurance in separate hands, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit has never once presented a man with an invoice.

The six years were not a payment schedule. This year is not a reimbursement. They are not the same currency and they were never in the same ledger, and treating them as a transaction is what is stopping you feeling anything at all.

You are not being paid out, you are being given something. Scripture says every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, James 1:17, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a man a harvest as a receipt for what he endured.

The gap between the news and the body

And there is the plain physical part of it, which almost nobody warns anybody about.

Six years taught your body one job, which was to brace. Not to hope too far, not to spend anything on an expectation, not to say a good word about a crop until it is in the shed. That was not weakness, it was how you got here, and it worked.

It does not switch off because eleven trailers went up a lane. The bracing is still on duty. Nobody has told it that it can stand down, and it will not take instruction from a good August.

So the numbness at the gate is not ingratitude. It is a man whose guard has been up for six years, and the lowering of it is a process.

You are whole now, on this side of it, whatever your chest is doing tonight. Scripture says He healeth the broken in heart and bindeth up their wounds, Psalm 147:3, and the Holy Spirit does that binding at His own pace and never once at the pace of the neighbors.