The Fence Post That Leans A Little

There is a post on that line that leans about four degrees and everybody walks past it.

It is fine. It has been fine for two years. The wire is tight, the fence holds, the animals stay where they are supposed to. If you took a level to it you would find it out, and nobody has ever taken a level to a fence in that county.

Her husband says he will get to it. He says that every autumn.

That is the picture. Here is the thing.

Her Bible sits on the shelf by her chair, where it has sat for about thirty five years, and the cover has gone soft the way they do.

And she has noticed that she does not pick it up much any more.

She has not stopped, exactly. What has happened is that she reads about it instead. There is a thing on her phone that sends her something every morning, and it is good, and it is often very good, and she reads it while the kettle boils and she thinks about it and it does her good.

It is not wrong. That is what has made it impossible to raise. Nobody in the world would tell her that a well written paragraph about Scripture is a bad thing to read at seven in the morning.

But she noticed a few weeks ago that she cannot remember the last time she opened the actual book and sat with it, and that it has been happening slowly for about a year and a half, and that the shelf is where her Bible now lives rather than where it goes back to.

Four degrees. Nothing has come down.

If you have noticed something like that in your own house, come and lean on this rail a minute. This is not going to become a list.

The One who started it is the one watching it

Paul writes a sentence that people quote for reassurance, and I want to read it as a description of who is paying attention.

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.Philippians 1:6

Notice that this is not a promise about your effort. It is a statement about somebody else's attentiveness. The One who began the work is the One carrying it, which means He is the one who notices four degrees while a fence is still perfectly sound.

That reframes entirely what happened to you at the kettle.

That was not a complaint arriving. That was the One doing the carrying, drawing your attention to one specific place where something has gone very slightly off true, at a point where nothing has come down and nothing is loose.

You were shown this early, and you were shown it gently, and both of those are on purpose. Philippians 1:6 puts the carrying in God's hands rather than yours, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the showing, which is why what came to you was one shelf and one book and not an audit of your whole life with God.

Reading about it is good. It is simply not the same thing.

Now let me deal with the reason you have not been able to raise this, because your objection is a fair one and it deserves an answer rather than a brush aside.

You are quite right that what you read at seven in the morning is good. Nobody is going to tell you otherwise and nothing here is against it.

But there is a plain difference between reading somebody's account of a country and standing in it, and everybody knows the difference in every other area of life. A recipe read is not a meal. A letter about your daughter is not your daughter.

What you have is a very good paragraph about the book, arriving daily, and a book on a shelf. And the paragraph has quietly taken the place of the thing it is about, and nobody planned that, and no morning was the morning it happened.

That is a four degree lean. It is not a collapse and I am not going to call it one.

You are being dealt with gently, and you are not under inspection. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed is not broken by Him and a faintly burning wick is not put out, and it is His Spirit who carries a word at exactly the temperature a person can take, so nothing at that kettle was an alarm going off.

And here is the ground under it, which this site will not leave out.

You are being kept while you keep watch, and the noticing was never resting on how sharp you are. Jude 24 says He is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you with great joy, and it is the Holy Spirit who noticed a book you had stopped opening, because God is the one keeping you and you are not standing this watch alone.

One thing. Not the rest of the list. Say the one thing and stop, because the pull to go hunting is exactly what turns a kindness into a weight.