He Dug Them Out Again

He is starting again and he believes he is starting from nothing, and the second half of that is what is going to exhaust him.

The starting again is real. Something ended. A long stretch of years came apart, and I am not going to be glib about how that happened, and it does not matter for what I want to say to you.

What matters is what he thinks is under his feet now.

He thinks it is bare ground. He thinks every single thing has to be built new: a new way of praying, a new understanding, a new set of habits, a whole new practice constructed from the beginning by a man of fifty-three with less energy than he had at thirty.

And that arithmetic is what is frightening him. Not the loss. The rebuild.

But look at what is actually there. He prayed for twenty years. He read for twenty years. There are habits in him worn so deep he does not notice them, and phrases that come to him unbidden, and a way of hearing a certain kind of sentence that took decades to form.

None of that was destroyed. It was covered over.

He is standing on a valley floor full of wells and he thinks it is desert because he cannot see any water.

So let me ask you.

What did you decide was gone when it was only filled in?

He reopened his father's wells

There is a short verse in Genesis about a man in a hard season, and the whole strategy of his recovery is in it.

Isaac is in a bad stretch. There has been famine, there has been hostility, and the wells that his father Abraham dug have been deliberately filled in with earth by people who wanted him gone.

And here is what he does.

Isaac reopened the wells that had been dug in the time of his father Abraham, which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham died, and he gave them the same names his father had given them.Genesis 26:18

He did not sink new ones.

He went to the places where water had been found before, and he dug out what had been filled in, and then he did something that is almost tender: he gave them back their old names.

Genesis 26 has a man in a hard year recovering by reopening what already existed rather than by starting from open ground, and the Spirit was in that method, so the bare ground you believe you are standing on has never once been bare.

Now, my friend, carefully, because this is a house that does not rush a grieving man.

I am not telling you nothing was lost. Something was lost. Filled-in wells are a real loss and the men who filled them meant it, and Isaac had to do actual digging with actual hands and it was not quick.

I am telling you what he did not have to do. He did not have to find water again. That work had been done by somebody else, a long time before, and the location of every one of those wells was already known.

Genesis 26 shows the finding already accomplished and only the clearing left, and the Spirit was in that distinction, which means the rebuild you are dreading is a great deal smaller than the one you have priced.

And take hold of the last clause, because it is the one I would give you if I could only give you one.

He gave them the same names his father had given them.

He did not rebrand his recovery. He did not make it a new thing to protect himself from the old thing. He called them what they had always been called.

Genesis 26 has him restoring the old names along with the water, and the Spirit was in that continuity rather than in any fresh start, so treating what you had before as unusable has never once been required of you.