The Name Burned Into the Gate

Every morning since the spring of the year his father died, Dale has walked the fence.

He starts at the gate at the top of the lane and he goes clockwise, and it takes him a bit over an hour if he does not stop, and he stops. He checks the staples. He checks where the wire runs down through the wet ground by the willows and gets loose every winter. He carries the pliers in his back pocket and a handful of staples in the other one and he does not need to think about any of it anymore, which is the trouble, because a man whose hands are busy and whose head is empty will find something for his head to do.

What his head does is this. Somewhere on the far side, usually down along the creek where the ground is soft, Dale starts checking a different fence. He starts going along the line of the thing that happened to him at nineteen at a revival meeting in a school gymnasium, and he checks the staples on that. Was he serious enough. Did he understand what he was agreeing to. Was that a real thing that happened or was it a Thursday night and a good singer and a boy who wanted his mother to stop worrying.

And every morning, somewhere down by the willows, he finds the same soft spot. And he pulls on the wire and it moves. And he thinks: there. There it is. I knew it.

He has been doing this for nine years. He has never once found a hole big enough to say for certain, and he has never once come up the lane satisfied. He is a good man and he runs a good outfit and his neighbors would tell you he is the steadiest fellow in the county, and he cannot get through one hour of daylight without inspecting his own salvation for a gap.

Here is what I want to say to Dale, and I am going to say it to you, because you have your own line and you walk it too. Maybe yours is at three in the afternoon instead of daylight. But you go along the thing that happened to you, checking the staples, pulling the wire to see if it moves, and it always moves, because wire always moves.

You have been reading the fence as the deed. It never was.

The wire was never what made it yours

Let me name it plain, the way I would say it leaning on that gate.

A fence marks a place. It does not own it. There is a piece of paper in a courthouse in the county seat with a description on it and a name on it, and that paper is what makes that ground Dale's ground. He could take every strand of that wire down tomorrow and burn the posts and the land would still be his, because the ownership never lived in the wire. It lives in the deed, and the deed has a name on it, and the name was not put there by Dale.

Now hear what God says about the person who belongs to Him, and hear who does the acting in the sentence.

Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine.Isaiah 43:1

Count the verbs. I have redeemed. I have called. Thou art mine. Every one of them is God doing something and you being the one it was done to. There is not a single clause in that verse where the person being spoken to does the work of holding on. You were redeemed and you were called by your own name, and it is already done, and the doing of it was never yours. I am not handing you my opinion of your case; that is written in the prophet, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence spoken over a nation in exile and lays it across a man walking a fence at daylight.

Whose name is on the gate

Dale's grandfather burned the name into the top rail of that gate with a running iron in 1951. It is still there. Weathered gray and worn shallow, but you can put your thumb in it.

That is a fair picture of what God does. He does not tie a tag on. He marks the thing. Scripture says we are sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise (Ephesians 1:13), and a seal in that world was hot wax and a signet ring: the owner pressed his own mark into the thing and it stayed pressed.

You have a mark on you that you did not put there and cannot wear off, and it is already set, and it was set by the owner. The word says sealed, and the Holy Spirit is not only named in that verse as the one who does the sealing, He is the seal.

And here is the part that would stop Dale at the willows if he would let it. A man does not brand a calf he is not sure about. The marking is not the animal's declaration; it is the owner's. You are marked, and the one who marked you was not guessing.

Nine years of the same soft ground

I want to say something honest about the checking itself, because I am not going to tell you it is a sin and I am not going to tell you to just stop it, which is advice that has never once worked on any man alive.

Checking a fence is a good habit. It comes from caring about the stock. What has gone wrong is not the caring. It is that the fence got promoted. Somewhere back there, without a decision ever being made about it, the wire stopped being the marker and became the proof, and now every soft spot in the ground is a verdict on whether Dale belongs to God.

So we are going to demote the fence and go get the deed.

You have a standing that rests on His redeeming and His calling, and it is already settled, and no soft spot down by the creek gets a vote in it. It is written, thou art mine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old line land on a man in his own field with pliers in his back pocket.