A Chain On The Old Gate

It is a good chain. That is the first thing he notices, which annoys him about himself.

Galvanized, proper links, and a padlock that has not been out in the weather long. Somebody bought that on purpose and put it on with two hands.

The gate itself he knows better than he knows some relatives. He has lifted that gate over the sag in the ground on the left for thirty years, because it drops about two inches when the hinge is wet, and everybody who uses that track knows to lift it.

Used to know.

The land changed hands in the autumn. The new owner is entitled to do this. He is not a villain, he is a man who bought a field and read what came with it, and there is no ancient right on that track that would stand up anywhere, and the people who told him at the market that there was were wrong and meant well.

Thirty years. To the top field, then the wood, then down. He has walked it with three dogs, two of them dead. He walked it on the morning of his father's funeral and did not tell anybody he had gone.

The sentence is not he has no right. He is a fair man and he has worked out that the new owner has every right. It is: that was my way, and now there is not a way.

You know that gate. It might be a track, or a door somebody changed the locks on, or a route into something that a decision closed. Somebody entirely within their rights has shut the only way you had, and you cannot even make a proper enemy of them, which somehow makes it heavier.

What was there before He made one

There is a sentence in Isaiah that everybody quotes and almost nobody looks at the location of.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.Isaiah 43:19

The wilderness. Not a slightly overgrown path. Not a route that needed clearing. Wilderness is the word for the place where there is no way, and the whole force of the promise is that the making happens where nothing exists to be improved.

Which means a chained gate is not the problem the verse is answering. The verse is answering a place with no gate at all.

And notice the verb. He does not find a way. He does not point one out. He makes one.

You are inside a promise made specifically for places where there is no way, and it has never once required an existing route to work with. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man at a gate, and the Holy Spirit who has walked that track with you for thirty years is the evidence that the making does not depend on anybody's title deeds.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic at that gate. If He makes ways where there are none, then a good chain on a good gate is information about a sale in the autumn and a man exercising a right. It is not the end of the road, and it never had the standing to become that.

What this will not do to the man who closed it

Here is the second thing, and it matters more than it looks.

Something in you has been building a case for four months. Not out loud. In the truck, mostly, and at about two in the morning. And the case is good, and the case is legally worthless, and the building of it is doing something to you that a chain never could.

This page is not going to help you build it. There is no room here for the new owner to become a villain, because he is not one, and because a man who spends the next ten years angry at somebody who was within his rights has been shut out of considerably more than a track.

You have been carried through every one of those thirty years and through this autumn, and the carrying was never routed through that gate. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than waiting to see whether a padlock comes off.

And nothing here promises the gate opens. Not this year, not ever. Nobody on this page knows whether you walk that track again, and a promise about a specific padlock is not one that anybody was authorized to make. What is promised is a God who makes ways in places that have none, and He has not told anybody in advance what the way looks like.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought at a cold gate. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not built into a case in a truck at two in the morning. And the thing in the way is not the new owner. It is a sentence: now there is not a way. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority standing in front of a padlock. Scripture gives the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how right you were about the track.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than anger, and there are days you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.