He Said In My Flesh And He Meant It

The gate at the top of the lane is the good one to lean on because it faces west and the whole pasture goes copper at about eight.

His son-in-law brought the chair up in the truck last spring. It sits by the gate now under a tarp when it rains, and everybody in the family pretends that was always the plan.

Seventy-two years old.

They come out with him some evenings, two or three of them, and they lean on the gate the way he used to lean on it, and they talk about the fence and about somebody's dog and about a truck somebody bought badly.

He is in the chair. And he is happy. That is worth saying, because people assume a man in that chair is not, and he is.

But there is a sentence that has settled in him over about eighteen months and he has never said it to a soul, because it is the sort of sentence that would upset his daughter and there is no need.

The sentence is this: whatever happens after, it will not be me. Something of me maybe. A soul, a spark, whatever the word is. But the man who leaned on this gate for fifty years, with these hands and this back and the eye that never was any good, that man is finishing here, and what carries on will be something else with his name on it.

If you have ever thought that, you know it is not despair. It is a conclusion, and it came from looking at your own hands.

Job says mine four times and he will not be moved off it

The weight first, all of it, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it never gets shortened to get somewhere better.

What this costs is not the gate. It is the quiet belief that you are already partly gone. It costs you the confidence that the man on the other side of this is the same man, which is a thing most people never even have to think about. It costs the fifty years of leaning, which are in your back and nowhere else. It costs the sentence, which you will not say because your daughter would cry. And it costs you an evening in a good chair with your family around you, being happy and being certain you are the last chapter of yourself.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your eighteen months made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before another word: if that sentence has gone further than a conclusion, into thinking the family would have easier evenings without the chair by the gate at all, tell one living person today. Your doctor, your son-in-law, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks no man to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who drive a truck up a lane.

Now, Job. A man on an ash heap who has lost everything and whose body is in a state, arguing with three friends who keep improving on his situation.

For I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and though after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another.Job 19:25-27

Read how many times he says it is his.

My redeemer. My skin. My flesh. Mine eyes. And then the phrase that a man in a chair by a gate needs, which is the one nobody quotes: and not another.

He could have said it in general terms. He could have said that God will be seen, or that the righteous will be vindicated, or any of the safe things his friends would have preferred. He does not. In the middle of the worst argument in the Old Testament, he insists, four times over, on his own person, in his own flesh, with his own eyes.

You are the one who does the seeing, and Job would not let anybody generalize that away from him. Job 19:27 ends on the words not another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a man's insistence off an ash heap and lays it on a gate at eight in the evening.

Now look at the honesty of the verse before it. Though after my skin worms destroy this body. He is not pretending. He knows exactly what happens to a body and he says so in a sentence that most modern writers would soften.

And then, in the same breath, yet in my flesh. He puts the destruction and the seeing in one sentence and he does not resolve the tension for us, and the thing he will not give up is the continuity of himself.

You have a continuity that Job would not surrender even at his lowest. That is written into Job 19:26, and His Spirit in you is the guarantee that the person doing the seeing is the person who leaned on the gate.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because you have had eighteen months of good people saying warm things across a fence.

It says nothing about your body improving. Job's did not, for a very long time, and the speech is made in the middle of it and not after it. Nothing here predicts your back or your hands or next spring, and I will not predict them, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And it does not tell you when. Job says at the latter day, which is not a season and not a year, and I am not going to convert it into one to give you a warmer evening.

You were never asked to accept that the man in the chair is a rough draft. Scripture has Job saying my flesh and mine eyes and not another, and the same Spirit who inspired that sentence is the one who carries it up a lane.