The Standing Stone On The Boundary

There is a stone at the top of that field that is not a rock. It was put there.

You can tell because of how it stands, and because of what happens to the wall on either side of it, and because a woman in her eighties in that village once told her that it had been the boundary since before anybody's grandmother.

She goes up there most weeks. Not for any reason. It is a good walk and there is a view and she likes standing next to a thing that somebody set upright a very long time ago for a reason nobody now remembers.

Here is the other thing, and it is the reason I am telling you about the stone.

There is something in that family that does not get said in front of the children.

It happened a long time ago. It involved two people who are both dead now. And when she married into that family, an aunt who was already old took her aside at the reception, of all places, and told her the whole of it in about four minutes and then said: and now you know, and it does not go past you.

She was twenty three. She said yes because you do.

Twenty years later, she has never said it. Not once, not when it would have won her an argument, not when a cousin nearly worked it out, not on the night when it would have explained everything to somebody who deserved an explanation.

And a few weeks ago, standing next to that stone, she realized she had stopped thinking of it as something she was given.

It is just a thing she does not talk about. A habit. A silence with no story behind it any more.

And she stood there and thought: somebody handed me this, and I have forgotten that it was handed.

If something in your hands has become just a habit, come and sit on the grass. Nothing here is an alarm.

The stone was set by somebody, on purpose, before you got there

There is a small law in Deuteronomy that always stops me.

You shall not move your neighbour's landmark, which the men of old have set.Deuteronomy 19:14

It is a property law and it is doing something larger. A boundary stone in that world was the only thing standing between a family and being quietly squeezed off their own ground, and it had no lock and no guard. It worked entirely because everybody in the valley agreed not to move it.

And the phrase which the men of old have set is the load bearing part. The stone is not an accident of geology. Somebody put it there, on purpose, before you arrived, and the whole arrangement rests on people who did not set it agreeing to keep it.

That is exactly what happened to you at a wedding when you were twenty three.

You were handed something on purpose, and it is still a trust in your hands this afternoon. Deuteronomy 19:14 puts the setting before the keeping, and it is the Holy Spirit whom 2 Timothy 1:14 names as the strength inside the guarding, which means twenty years of silence has not been twenty years of your willpower.

The keeping did not shrink because the feeling did

Now the second half, and it is the one to hear standing in the wind next to that stone.

You have not lost anything. You have kept it perfectly. By any external measure you are an exceptional keeper: there were at least three occasions when speaking would have cost somebody else and saved you, and you did not.

What has thinned is your sense that it was ever given, and that is a completely different problem from the one you have been half accusing yourself of.

And the noticing itself is worth something. You have been shown this early, and you were shown it gently, and nothing at all has been broken. Romans 2:4 says it is the kindness of God that leads a person, and it is His Spirit who carries that kindness at exactly the temperature a person can take, which is why what came to you on a hillside was one quiet sentence rather than a review of your marriage.

Now the half that makes the watching restful rather than nervous, because this site refuses to run the second without the first.

You are the one being kept, and that has been true on every walk you took up here not thinking about it. 1 Peter 1:5 says you are guarded by the power of God, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the seal and the guarantee, so the arrangement has never once rested on how vigilant you were being.

Both hands in this belong to God. He is holding what you entrusted to Him, and He is holding you while you hold what was entrusted to you. A woman who believes she is the only thing standing between a family and a very old wound cannot rest, and you were never the only thing.