The Far End Of The Field

He has started doing a thing at the start of every job, and he has only just noticed it.

He looks at the far end.

Not to plan it. He has planned jobs his whole life and that is not what this is. He looks at the far end of a field, or a roof, or a fence line, and he does a small piece of arithmetic that goes: and will I still be able to do this in ten years.

He is sixty. There is nothing wrong with him. He can still do a day's work that would flatten most men of forty and he would tell you so, and he would be right.

It is not fear of dying either. He is entirely at peace about that and always has been.

It is that somewhere in the last couple of years, the far end of every job started meaning the far end of everything else, and now he cannot begin a fence without also, underneath, beginning a calculation about the whole rest of his life.

And the calculation always has the same shape.

Whether I get to the end of this properly is down to me. My legs. My back. My attention. My not letting anything slip.

He has not said that to a soul. His wife would tell him to sit down and stop it, and she would be right, and he would still be doing it by Tuesday.

If you have started looking at the far end, sit down on a bale. There is no warning here and nothing is at risk in the way you have been quietly calculating.

Persuaded is not the same as hopeful

Paul writes a sentence from a prison to a young man who is frightened, and it is one of the plainest sentences in the New Testament.

I know whom I have believed, and I am persuaded that He is able to guard until that day what has been entrusted to me.2 Timothy 1:12

Read the two halves. He does not say I know what I believe. He says I know whom. And then the confidence that follows is not about his own endurance at all. It is a settled opinion about somebody else's capability.

Persuaded is a strong word. It means the argument is over. Paul is not hoping, and he is not encouraging himself. He has considered the matter and reached a verdict about God, and then he stops talking about himself entirely.

And notice the phrase until that day. It runs to the end. The keeping is not for the part of the road Paul had already walked. It is specifically for the part he had not.

You are being guarded to the end, and the guarding was never listed among your jobs. 2 Timothy 1:12 puts the ability squarely in God's hands until that day, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the guarantee of the inheritance in Ephesians 1:14, which means the far end of your field is already inside somebody else's undertaking.

A man can work the near end without carrying the far one

Now let me say the thing plainly, because you are a practical man and I am not going to talk around it.

There is nothing wrong with planning. Nothing here is an argument against sense. If you want to think about who will do this fence in fifteen years, that is good management and it is love and it is not anxiety.

What has happened is subtler, and you know it, which is why you have not said it out loud.

You have put your own perseverance on the list of things you are personally responsible for delivering. And that is a different item from a fence, because it is the one item on the list that was never yours.

You are not the contractor on your own finishing, and you never signed for it. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began the good work is the one who brings it to completion, and it is His Spirit who is the seal on it, so the arithmetic you run at the start of every job was never actually assigned to you.

Jude ends his letter the same way, and it is worth hearing in full: to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of His glory with great joy. Able to keep. Able to present. Not one of those belongs to the man being kept, and the destination is not survival. It is joy, and the joy is His idea before it is ever yours.

Now I will not tell you how the years will go. Nobody can and nobody should, and anybody handing you a prediction about your own back or your own years is selling you something.

But there is no alarm here either. You are held by somebody who does not get tired, and you are held tonight. Isaiah 40:28 says He does not faint or grow weary and His understanding is unsearchable, and it is His Spirit within you who keeps a man going long past the point where his own calculation ran out.

God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. You have been doing the near end of the field all your life. Somebody else has had the far end the whole time.