The Fence He Moved in the Spring of a Bad Year

It is about eleven feet. That is the whole of it. Eleven feet, running maybe three hundred yards, in the spring of a year when your father was dying and you were not paying attention to fences.

You noticed in the August. By then the posts were set in concrete and there was new wire on them and he had run stock across it twice, and you went down there and stood on the road and looked at it for a while.

You said something to him about it in the September. He looked you in the eye, in the yard, with his hat in his hand, and told you where the line had always been. He said it plain and he said it steady and he has never wavered from it since, not once, in eleven years.

You looked into it. There is a plan somewhere from 1958 that is not clear, and a solicitor who told you what it would cost and what it would do to two families, and you decided.

You drive past that post twice a day. School run in the morning, back from the co-op in the afternoon. And every single time, without deciding to, you say a sentence in your head, and it is the same sentence, and after eleven years it is worn as smooth as a creek stone.

He waved at you Tuesday. You waved back. And then you said it.

He gave the instruction to people with no court to go to

Pull over a minute. Leave it running if you want. I am not going to tell you the fence is where it ought to be and I am not going to ask you to sign anything away.

Let me be plain first, because Scripture will not have me being slippery and the Spirit does not do flattery: the fence moved. That is a fact and I am not going to spiritualize it into a misunderstanding. He knows and you know, and no part of this article requires you to pretend otherwise, and God is not confused about eleven feet.

Now come and look at what the Lord said, and look at who He was saying it to.

But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.Matthew 5:44

He said that to farmers and fishermen under an occupying army, people who had no realistic court, no appeal, no expectation of getting anything back in this life. He did not hand them a remedy. He did not tell them how to get their land returned. He told them what to do with their mouths.

That is not because the wrong did not matter. It is because He knew what a rehearsed sentence does to a man over eleven years, and He was not willing to leave His people carrying it.

You have been given the right to stop saying that sentence, and it was given to you a long time before those posts went in. That is not me making light of your ground. That is what is written, and what the instruction says and what it deliberately does not include, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a man in a pickup on a gravel road.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a neighbor who took something. When you say a blessing over that man, you are not conceding the line. You are not signing anything. You are not agreeing with what he said in the yard in the September. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a man made in His image. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it, and He is not thereby recording a boundary change.

A blessing said at that gatepost does not move a fence one inch in either direction, and it was never designed to. Scripture says the LORD is a God of judgment, and blessed are all they that wait for him (Isaiah 30:18), which puts the matter of who was right in the hands of somebody who has the whole plan and not a smudged sheet from 1958, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that true for a man who decided not to go to law.

What eleven years of that sentence has done

Now let me take something off you, because I think you have been hauling it and calling it not letting him get away with it. What is written will take it, and the Spirit is the one lifting.

Somewhere in the second or third year, that sentence stopped being about the fence. It became a thing your mouth does at a landmark, twice a day, like a cattle guard rattling under the tires. You do not choose it. It arrives.

And a man cannot say a verdict over another man twice a day for eleven years without it setting. It has cost you the road. There is a stretch of gravel you have driven since you were sixteen years old and it is not neutral ground any more, and that is eleven years of your own life, not his.

That is not toughness. It is a man holding a case open that he already decided not to bring, and what is written never once required a verdict as proof that a wrong occurred. The Spirit is not asking you to say the fence is fine. He is asking for the road back.

The line is on record somewhere better than the county office, and it always has been. It is written that the LORD is a God of judgment and that those who wait for Him are blessed (Isaiah 30:18), and the same Spirit who breathed that line is riding in that truck with you twice a day, which is why it lands as a fact and not as a nice thought.

Hear what I am not doing, because a man in your position gets sold something at this point and I will not do it. I am not telling you to go down to that yard. Not a conversation, not a handshake, not one word to him about eleven feet. Blessing is not reconciliation and it is not permission and it does not put you in a room with anybody. If you go to law next spring, that is between you, your solicitor and God, and nothing here is a ruling on it.

What you say at a gatepost with nobody in the truck but you is a real thing, and it is complete without that man ever knowing it happened. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and it does not need to cross a fence line to have been said.