The Lines Were Drawn Before I Got Here

He thinks of what he has as a position he took up, and there is a loneliness in that word that he has never examined.

A position is something you occupy. You defend it. You hold it. You can be pushed off it. It is yours by effort and it stays yours by effort.

That is exactly how he holds his faith, and it is exhausting in a very particular way.

Everything is being maintained. Nothing is being inhabited.

He could not tell you where any of it came from. Not the words he prays with, not the shape of a Sunday, not the fact that he thinks about God as a Father at all, which is a thing somebody had to say to somebody once.

So he stands on ground he believes he cleared himself, defending a plot he thinks he staked.

And a man who cleared his own ground has nobody to thank and nobody to blame and nothing under him but his own work.

He is forty-nine. He has been holding a position for twenty-two years.

Nobody has told him he is standing on terraces that were cut into that hillside long before anybody alive was born.

So let me ask you.

Who measured the ground you are standing on?

Somebody measured it out

There is a line in the psalms about land, and I want it read the way a man who works ground would read it.

The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.Psalm 16:6

Boundary lines.

That is surveying language. A cord, a measurement, corners set. It describes ground that has been divided up and allotted, which means somebody stood there with a line and worked out where this piece ends and the next begins.

And the verb is fallen. The lines fell for him. He did not draw them.

Psalm 16 describes a portion measured and allotted by somebody else rather than ground taken by the man standing on it, and the Spirit was in that allotting, so the plot you believe you staked yourself has never once been ground you cleared.

Now, come and sit down a minute, cousin, because I want to say this slowly.

There is nothing wrong with working. You have worked, and the twenty-two years are real, and I am not going to pretend a man does not have to tend what he is given. Psalm 16 still calls the same ground an inheritance rather than a claim, and the Spirit was in the allotting of it.

But there is a difference between tending and clearing, and the difference is what you believe is under your feet.

A man who thinks he cleared it must hold it alone. A man who knows it was allotted can work it hard and still sleep, because the ground does not depend on his grip.

Psalm 16 gives the word inheritance to the same ground in the same breath, and the Spirit put allotment and delight together in one verse, which means twenty-two years of defending a position has been twenty-two years of guarding something that was handed over.

And notice where the lines fell. In pleasant places.

The psalm is not congratulating him on his negotiation. He got good ground, and the goodness of it is not his achievement either.

Psalm 16 has him receiving both the ground and the pleasantness of it, and the Spirit was in that whole giving, so having nothing under you but your own work has never once been an accurate description of where you are standing.