The Plans Are Drawn and the Land Is Gone

The plans are in a cardboard tube behind the driver's seat, and they have been there since March.

He drives out at twenty past four because that is when he always drove out. Down the lane, past the second gate, park on the grass, walk the last bit. The wire fence has a post at the corner that leans, and he has leaned on that post so many times it has learned the shape of his forearm.

He knows this field the way a man knows a room he grew up in.

He knows the kitchen window goes on the west wall, because in October the light comes across that hedge at half past four and lands exactly where a person would be standing at a sink. He knows the stove goes on the inside wall because of what the wind does in February. He knows where the boot room is. He knows which of those two ash trees stays and which one has to come down, and he had already made his peace with the one that has to come down.

Eleven months of evenings, at that kitchen table, with a pencil and a rubber and a mug going cold at his elbow.

On Thursday it was sold to somebody else.

Not through anything he did. Not through anything he could have moved faster on. It went the way those things go, in a phone call of about ninety seconds, and the man on the other end was kind about it, and that made it worse rather than better.

And here he is at twenty past four, at the leaning post, looking at a field with somebody else's name on it, holding nothing, with the tube still behind the seat because he cannot bring himself to take it out of the truck and he cannot bring himself to throw it away.

That is you.

Maybe not a field. Maybe the wedding, the course, the second child, the move, the year abroad, the retirement you had costed out to the month, the thing your body was going to keep on doing.

You had it drawn. Not vaguely. Drawn, in detail, with the light coming in the window at the right time of the afternoon, and now there is a tube behind your seat and nothing to unroll it onto.

Before anything else, two things. What has happened to you is not a failure of faith. And I am not going to explain it to you. I do not know why that field went, or why it went to somebody else, and I am not going to hand you a reason with my name on it while you are still standing at the wire.

The psalm never hands the man a map

Psalm 25 is written by somebody who does not know what is coming. That is the whole situation of it. He asks four separate times to be shown, taught, led, guided. He is not asking for reassurance. He is asking for direction, out loud, repeatedly, which is what a person does when direction is precisely what he has not got.

And in the middle of it the psalm turns and makes a statement about a man like that.

What man is he that feareth the LORD? him shall he teach in the way that he shall choose.Psalm 25:12

Read carefully what is being promised, because it is smaller than what you wanted and larger than anything the week has given you.

You have not been left to work the road out on your own, and that was settled a long time before Thursday. Psalm 25:9 says the meek He guides in judgment, which is a promise about God's own conduct rather than a comment on the walker's competence, and the Holy Spirit is called alongside exactly so that nobody has to navigate from memory.

He is promised a teacher. He is not promised the itinerary. Nowhere in that psalm does anybody get handed a five year picture with the light coming in the window at the right hour. What is handed over is a person who knows the ground and who teaches, in the way, as the way is being walked.

You have the Teacher, and He was never the same thing as the drawings. Psalm 25:12 puts the guiding in God's hands and leaves the road unnamed on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as the one leading a person into all truth, in real time, at walking pace.

That is not a consolation prize. A map is only any use if the ground stays where the map says it is. A guide is worth more than a map exactly on the days when it does not.

You were never actually depending on the paper in that tube, even in the eleven months you thought you were. The written psalm asks God to lead in truth and to teach, and what comes back inside the psalm is His character and not a route (Psalm 25:5), and the Spirit of God has been the one keeping your feet on that lane all week while your plans were somewhere else entirely.

Planning it was not the sin, and losing it is not the correction

I want to be exact here, because this is where the wrong sentence usually arrives.

I am not going to tell you that God closed that gate because He had a better field. I do not know that. Nobody standing at your fence knows that, and the people who say it are mostly trying to make an unbearable silence stop, which is a kind thing to want and a cruel thing to do.

I am also not going to tell you that you loved the plan too much, that you should have held it loosely, or that eleven months of evenings at a kitchen table were a lesson in something. You drew a house. Drawing a house is a good and human thing to do, and the Bible is full of people who counted the cost of a tower before building it, which is the same activity.

You are held tonight with no correction attached to the holding, and nothing you did at that kitchen table is being counted against you. Psalm 25:8 has God teaching sinners in the way, which puts the teaching outside the question of whether the man deserved it, and the Holy Spirit does not turn up at a fence line carrying a verdict.

There is a line early in that psalm that belongs to you tonight. Let none that wait on Thee be ashamed. The man praying it clearly expects to be laughed at for having waited.

You are not being laughed at, and there is no shame anywhere near you for having drawn the thing in detail. Psalm 25:3 says as much in plain words, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the sting out of a sentence like that and puts it somewhere a man can actually feel it, standing at a leaning post at twenty past four.