Somebody Stacked These Stones

Twenty minutes into the cloud she stopped being sure there was a path.

That is what the fog does up there. It does not hide the mountain, it hides the idea of the mountain, so that you are simply standing on some wet ground with more wet ground in front of you and nothing to tell you that anybody has ever wanted to be where you are.

She had been walking for a while on faith and irritation. The ground under her boots might have been a track worn by two hundred years of feet or it might have been the way water runs off a slope. There was no way to tell. She had begun composing the sentence she would say to herself at the top about how she should have turned back.

Then her boot caught something and a stone rolled away downhill, and she looked down and saw that she had just kicked the top off a little tower.

Four stones, one on top of another, tapering. Not a heap. Not something water does.

She stood there in the cloud with her hands on her knees and something went through her that she had not expected at all and could not explain to anybody afterwards without sounding sentimental about a pile of rocks.

Somebody made that.

Somebody stood exactly here, in weather like this, probably wondering exactly what she had been wondering, and instead of turning round they bent down and stacked four stones so that whoever came next would know.

She put the fallen one back on top. And then, about forty paces on, out of the white, another one came up.

You are at the back of a very long line

Here is the feeling, and I want to name it exactly, because people who have it almost never say it out loud.

It is not doubt. You believe. It is the sensation of doing something unprecedented in a family, a house, a street or a stage of life, so that every ordinary thing has to be worked out from first principles by you, on your own, at speed.

Nobody in your family has done this, so there is no one to ask what to do when it gets awkward at Christmas. Nobody in your circle prays, so praying is a thing you invented and might be doing wrong. You have no one who has already been through the middle bit, the long unglamorous stretch, and come out still standing. You feel like the first person on the mountain, in the cloud, making up the route.

And it is exhausting in a very particular way, because being first is not just lonely. It is heavy. If you are the first, then everything rests on your judgement and your stamina, and there is nothing behind you to lean on when either runs out. Hebrews 12 tells the runner to throw off everything that hinders before it tells him to run, and the Spirit put the shedding first, so the weight of being first was never issued to you.

So let me tell you what is actually going on, and it is the opposite of what it feels like.

Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us put off every weight and the sin that entangles so easily, and let us run with patient endurance the race that is set before us.Hebrews 12:1

Surrounded. Not watched from a distance by a panel. Surrounded, the way a runner coming into the last stretch is surrounded, on both sides, by the noise of people who have already run it.

You are not first. You are late, and being late to something is one of the great mercies of this faith. Everything you are working out this week has been worked out before, in worse conditions, by people who did not have your advantages and had it much harder, and they came through, and the fact that you are holding this at all means they left the stones stacked. Hebrews 12 says we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, and the Spirit was in every one of those lives long before yours, so you are late in company rather than short of anything.

Because that is what the ones ahead of you actually did. Not one heroic founder and then silence. A long, unbroken habit of ordinary people who kept the thing going in their own century: kept feeding whoever turned up at the door, kept the door itself open through wars and plagues and centuries when it would have been much more sensible to close it, kept saying the words when nobody clever was listening. Universal never meant impressive. It meant this is for everybody, everywhere, including whoever walks in next, including you.

Somebody bent down in the fog so that you would know there was a path here.

Now, one thing I am deliberately not going to do, and I would rather say so than have you wondering where I am steering you.

I am not going to settle for you what the living may say to the dead. People who love God with everything they have hold that differently, and this is a message for somebody who feels alone on a hillside, not a ruling on a question I have no business ruling on in the middle of your loneliness. What I am handing you is much plainer and nobody argues about it: they went before you. They held the same faith. They are not theoretical, they were people with knees and bad backs and worse weather, and their having been here is a fact about the ground you are standing on.

You are not doing this from nothing. You are doing it from a long way in. Hebrews 12 has the race marked out before the runner arrives, and the Spirit was in that marking out, so the ground you are standing on was surveyed generations ago.