I Fixed the Fence in February

He rebuilt eighty rods of fence in February, which is the wrong month to do it in.

The ground was still hard in the mornings and soft by two in the afternoon, and he worked through both conditions and he did it right. New posts, tamped properly. Braces at every corner. The old wire rolled and stacked, not left in the ditch the way his neighbor leaves it.

He also took a second job in February. Three evenings a week at the co-op, unloading, which he does not need the money for in any way he could explain to his wife.

And he cleaned out the barn loft, which had not been cleaned out since his father died.

His wife asked him about it once, in the kitchen, without any edge on it. She said, you have been going hard since Christmas. And he said the fence needed doing, which was true, and she said all right, and that was the end of it, and he stood at the sink for a while afterward with the water running and did not turn it off.

Because here is what he knows and has not got a way to say.

He is not fixing the fence because the fence needs fixing. He is fixing the fence because when he is driving posts he is full. Something in him is running while the maul is coming down, and he can feel it, and it is the closest thing to being filled up that he has had in about two years.

And it drains out. Every time. Somewhere between the last post and the truck door it goes, and by the time he is on the county road he is exactly as hollow as he was at seven that morning, and the only thing he has gained is a list of what is left to fix.

He has started running out of things to fix. That is what has him worried.

You will know your own version of the fence line. The thing you do because doing it is the only time you feel full.

Motion is not supply

Say the obvious thing first so it is not hanging over the rest. Work is good. The fence is good. God is not disappointed in a man who rebuilt eighty rods in the wrong month and did it properly.

But there is a difference between motion and supply and he has been running them together.

Motion is a thing he generates. It costs him and it produces something, and while it is happening it feels like fullness because his own engine is turning over. Supply comes from outside. It does not cost him anything and he cannot start it.

And a man who confuses the two will always end up where he is, which is out of fence line. Motion has a bottom. He has been running an engine on the heat of its own running and there is a limit to how long that works.

Zechariah names the exact confusion, and he names it to a man in the middle of a building project.

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

That is not said to a lazy man. It is said to Zerubbabel, who is rebuilding a temple, with a real crew and a real deadline and real opposition. The word does not arrive to correct his idleness. It arrives to correct his arithmetic.

You are not being told to stop working, and Zechariah 4:6 was spoken over a working man with a job half done, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a sentence said on a building site and lands it in a truck cab on a county road.

The two words he has been living on

Look at the two words that get set aside. Might and power. In the Hebrew those are close to force and capacity: what a man can bring, and what a man has got.

Both of them are his. Both of them are real. Neither of them is denied or insulted. They are simply named as the wrong fuel for this particular thing.

And that is the whole problem in his February. He brought might, which is why the posts are tamped right. He brought power, which is why he took the second job on top of it. And he brought them to a shortage that has never once responded to either.

You have been paying in the only currency you had and it does not spend here, because the written word says not by might and not by power in the same breath, and His Spirit is what turns that from a verse he could quote into a thing he stops doing.

Then the sentence turns, and the turn is where the supply is. But by my Spirit. Not by a better effort. Not by a bigger effort. By something that comes from outside the man and does not run down when he does.

You are being handed a supply that starts somewhere other than your own arms, because the written word gives the whole of it to the Spirit of God in that one turn of the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes that land on a man who has run out of fence line.

The fence was not the sin

Now the part he is bracing for, because a man like him hears a verse like that and immediately assumes he is about to be told to slow down.

Nobody is telling him to slow down. That is not what Zechariah says and it is not what this is about. He can rebuild the north line in March if it needs it.

What is being taken away is the job the fence has been quietly doing. It has been serving as a supply and it was never going to be one, and that is not a moral failure. It is a category mistake made by a man who was doing the one thing he knew how to do about an emptiness he had no other tools for.

You were never wrong to work, and Zechariah 4 corrects an arithmetic and not a character, and the same Spirit who spoke it over a half built temple speaks it over a truck with the engine off in a yard.

And notice that the temple did get built. The verse does not end the project. It changes what the project runs on. The man kept working. The supply changed hands.