The Fence Staple Before Daylight

For the hand who is at the same fence line again, in the same weather, before it is properly light.

You're at the third post from the corner with a hammer, a handful of staples, and a lantern hooked over the top wire because the sky hasn't decided anything yet.

This rail has been off four times since November. Not because anybody did it badly. The ground moves here, there's water under it that nobody has ever traced, and the post works loose in a way that a post fifty yards along does not.

So you drive a staple, check the tension, walk the next hundred yards, and come back to this same corner in about five weeks. That's the job. It has been the job for eleven years and there is no version of it that ends.

Work that is never finished is not work that fails, and repetition is not the same as futility. Scripture says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as to the Lord, for ye serve the Lord Christ, while the Holy Spirit is at a fence line before it gets light.

What Repetition Does to a Person

Be exact about it, because this is a particular difficulty and it deserves better than the usual encouragement about hidden work.

You are not unnoticed. Everybody on this place knows the fence gets mended and most of them know who does it. That isn't the problem.

The problem is that nothing accumulates. A man who builds a barn can walk past it in twenty years. You cannot walk past anything. Eleven years of work and the fence is exactly as mended as it was in your first winter, which is to say mended for now, and a hundred yards of wire is not a monument to anything.

You have work that does not accumulate, which is different from work that does not count. The written Word calls it serving the Lord Christ rather than building a record, while the Holy Spirit is in the fourth mending of the same rail.

That's the honest shape of it, and naming it is worth more than being told the fence matters, which you already know.

What This Message Does Not Promise You

There's a version of this teaching that goes badly wrong, and it is worth refusing before somebody offers it.

That version says that if you do it faithfully, God will notice and something will come of it. A better position. Your own place one day. A good year, or somebody finally saying what they think of your work.

There is none of that in the verse. Eleven years of staples put God under no obligation. Nothing is accruing on the strength of them, there is no balance anywhere, and the fence is not a lever.

That sounds at first like something being taken away, and it is worth sitting with until it stops sounding that way.

An obligation runs both directions. If eleven years had built a balance, then a bad winter could have spent it, and a stretch of poor work could have overdrawn it. What is actually true has no balance to spend and nothing to overdraw, which means no winter in the next eleven years can touch it either.

What the verse gives instead is present tense. Ye serve the Lord Christ. Not you will, not one day this will be counted. The serving is happening now, at the third post from the corner, before anything changes and whether or not anything ever does.

You are serving now, and nothing is being banked against a future. Scripture calls it service to Christ in the present tense, while the Holy Spirit is in the work rather than in a reward attached to it.

What the Fence Is Actually Holding

Here's something worth seeing, because the repetition hides it and nobody on this place will ever say it to you.

Behind that wire there are animals that have not got out. That's the whole product. Not one of them has gone through onto the road in eleven years. No incident, no phone call at two in the morning, no vehicle in a ditch, no conversation with a neighbor that neither of you would ever recover from.

The value of your work is a set of events that did not happen, and events that did not happen cannot be counted, praised, or put into anybody's account of the year.

You are preventing what leaves no record, and it is still the reason this place runs. The written Word puts the work under the Lord rather than under a measure, while the Holy Spirit sees what will never be written down.

The Third Post Is Not a Failure

There's one more thing worth settling before you walk the next hundred yards, and it's about the corner itself.

You have quietly treated that post as a defeat. Four times since November means, in some part of your head, that you haven't solved it, and a man who hasn't solved something is a man who is not quite good enough at his job.

Look at it honestly. There's water under that ground that nobody has traced. The post works loose because the earth moves, which is not a fact about your hammer. A perfect fencer with a perfect staple would be back at that corner in five weeks as well.

Some ground has to be tended rather than fixed. That's not a lesser kind of work, it's a different kind, and most of the important work in the world is that kind rather than the other.

The corner is not asking to be solved, it is asking to be tended. The written Word calls the tending itself service to Christ, while the Holy Spirit is in the fourth mending exactly as He was in the first.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Elias This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.