Half A Churchyard Cleared

There is a line. That is the thing about this particular unfinished work: you can stand on it.

On one side, grass, cut. Four beds turned over and edged with stone that four people carried in a wheelbarrow over two weekends. A bench, secondhand, sanded and oiled. Two rose bushes that have taken and one that has not.

On the other side, from the line onward, bramble to shoulder height and a holly that has decided it is a tree now, and somewhere under all of it about forty more stones that nobody has read for thirty years.

The line is exactly where they got to.

It was going to be a memorial garden. Not a grand one. A place where somebody who had lost a person could sit down outdoors near the church without having to explain themselves to anybody, because there is nowhere in that village to sit and be sad and not be asked if you are all right.

Four of them started it in the March. She was one, and she was the one who cared most, which is a thing she has thought about a great deal since.

Then the summer got very hot, and one of them had a hip, and the money for the second load of stone did not come, and the funeral of a man they all knew took a fortnight out of everybody, and by the September the bramble had done what bramble does in a wet August and the line stopped moving.

Two years. She goes and stands on the line about once a month.

The sentence is not we should get on with it. It is: there is a person who needed that bench who did not get it, and I know that.

You know that sentence. It might be a garden, or a rota, or a thing you meant to build for somebody specific and stopped halfway. There is a line somewhere in your life and you can stand on it, and standing on it has become a way of pronouncing sentence on yourself.

Who perfects, and in whom

There is a benediction at the end of Hebrews and almost everybody who quotes it stops one clause too early.

Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ.Hebrews 13:21

Make you perfect in every good work. People hear that as a wish that their projects would be completed. But look at the clause that follows, because it explains the first one: working in you that which is wellpleasing in His sight. The perfecting is happening inside a person. The good work being brought to completeness is not a garden. It is you, and He does it, and He does it through Jesus Christ rather than through your stamina in a hot August.

You are being perfected by God in every good work, standing on a line in a churchyard, and that perfecting did not stop where the bramble starts. That is what the written word says over you and not a kind reading I have chosen for a woman on a bad Tuesday, and the Holy Spirit who put the whole idea in you in the March is the evidence that the wanting and the working were both His.

Watch what that does to the accounting you do standing on that line. If the perfecting is happening in you, then a line in a churchyard is information about a hip, a hot summer, a funeral and a load of stone that did not arrive. It is not information about your character, and it never had the standing to become that.

The person who needed the bench

Here is the second thing, and it is the part that actually hurts, so I am not going to walk around it.

Somewhere in the last two years, somebody in that village lost a person and had nowhere to sit. That is right, and it is not a false guilt and I am not going to talk you out of a true thing.

But look at what your sentence quietly assumes: that the only comfort available to that person was a bench you did not build. That between them and God there stood four beds and a secondhand seat, and when the seat did not arrive, heaven had nothing else.

You have been carried through both of those years, and so has every grieving person in that village, and none of it depended on the bramble being cut. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been the comforter in that village, rather than an unfinished garden.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly the place a message like this could turn into a shove and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to get the bramble out. Not this autumn, not ever. If the holly becomes a proper tree and the four beds go back to grass you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because that work is a person and it does not have a boundary marked in stone.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a gentle thought at a hard line. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not carried to that line once a month in silence. And the thing in the way is not the hip and it is not the stone. It is a sentence: somebody needed that bench and did not get it, and it is mine. 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 woman with any authority standing in wet grass. Scripture gives you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how steadily you said them.

If these two years have taken you somewhere darker than regret, 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.