The Wall At Waist Height

There is a route to the shop that avoids it and he has been taking the long way for about eleven months without ever deciding to.

The wall runs along the top edge of the garden. Dry stone at the bottom where they knew what they were doing, then a stretch in the middle where they clearly did not, then nothing. Waist height, the whole length. Rain has been getting into the top course all winter and the frost has done what frost does, and two stones have come off and are lying in the grass where they fell.

Five of them started it. That is the number he cannot get away from. Five men on a Saturday in March, and somebody's cousin brought a van of stone from a demolition, and somebody's wife took a photograph that is still on a noticeboard in the community center, and everybody in it is laughing.

One moved away. One had a baby. One got ill in a way that stopped being temporary. One simply drifted, the way people do, and it would be unfair of anyone to name him for it.

That leaves him. And what he has done in eighteen months, honestly, is walk the other way to the shop.

The sentence is not we ran out of people. He knows they ran out of people. The sentence is: I am a man who starts things. Said the way you would say it about somebody you had stopped respecting.

You know that sentence. It might be a wall, or a room, or a course, or a promise made to somebody in a hospital corridor. There is something at waist height in your life, and you have quietly stopped taking the direct route past it.

The hands that started it are not your hands

There is a small prophecy in Zechariah that gets read at building projects and almost always misread, and it is exactly the thing you need standing in front of a wall at waist height.

The hands of Zerubbabel have laid the foundation of this house; his hands shall also finish it; and thou shalt know that the LORD of hosts hath sent me unto you.Zechariah 4:9

That looks at first like a promise to a man about his own project, and people preach it that way, and it does terrible damage when the project does not finish. But sit with the whole chapter. The line that governs it is the one everybody quotes without the context: not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts. The finishing that is promised there is not human stamina. It is the Spirit of God completing a thing He began, through whichever hands He chooses, and Zerubbabel is inside that finishing, not underneath it.

You are inside a work that the Spirit of God began and has never once handed over to you to complete. That is the written word's claim and not my kind reading of a bad situation, and the Holy Spirit who moved on five men on a Saturday in March is the evidence that the beginning was never yours to take credit for either.

Watch what that does to the accounting you have been doing on the long route to the shop. If the finishing belongs to His Spirit, then a wall at waist height is information about a house move, a baby, an illness and a drift. It is not information about your character, and it never had the standing to become that.

The work He is finishing is not the wall

Here is the second thing, and it takes the weight off entirely.

You have been reading the unfinished wall as an unfinished you. And there is a verse people hang on projects, that He who began a good work will complete it, which was never written about a building at all. It was written about people. The good work God began is a person, and He completes people, and He has been completing you at full pace all through the eighteen months when nothing was laid on that top course.

You have been under the finishing hand of God through every one of those eighteen months, and it did not pause because two stones fell into the grass. 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 standing at the top of the garden waiting for you to bring mortar.

There is something worth saying flat out, because this is exactly the place a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to finish the wall. Not this spring, not ever. If it stands at waist height for thirty years and somebody eventually takes the stone for something else you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because that work was never a construction schedule and it is not marked incomplete by weather.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm idea to carry the long way to the shop. 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 carried down a different street for eleven months. And the thing in the way is not the four men, every one of whom had a real life happen to him. It is a sentence: I am a man who starts things. That sentence has been running your errands with you for a year and a half and nobody has ever answered it out loud.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with authority standing in wet grass. Scripture gives you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how firmly you said them.

If that wall has taken you somewhere darker than embarrassment, and there are hours when 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.