The Pencil Line on the Tool Shed Door

For the steward who is trusted with everything except a say in what happens next.

There's a line on the inside of that door about five feet up, in pencil, with a date beside it from a year you have to squint at.

Somebody measured a child against it. That's all it is. The child is presumably in their thirties now and has no idea the mark exists, and the door has been on a tool shed for longer than anybody there can remember.

You look at it every morning when you get the tools out, which means you have looked at it perhaps two thousand times, and somewhere along the way it stopped being about a child.

It became the height of what you are. Everything below the line is yours. The beds, the water, the compost, the propagation, the twelve years of work that made that ground what it is. Everything above it belongs to people who come on Wednesdays and decide.

A mark measuring somebody else's child has become the measure of what you may contribute. Scripture says stand fast in the liberty with which Christ has made us free, while the Holy Spirit is at work in a man opening a shed at half seven.

How the Line Actually Got There

Be exact about it, because the pencil is not the point and the real line was never drawn on purpose.

There was a committee when you started. There was a way of doing it, with a division between people who worked the ground and people who decided about the ground. You arrived on the working side, which is where you wanted to be, and nobody ever suggested you were on the wrong side of anything.

Twelve years later the committee has changed completely. Nobody currently on it drew that division. Two of them have asked you questions that were plainly attempts to get your view. Both times you gave them a fact about drainage instead of an opinion, because a fact is what a man on your side of the line is allowed to give.

Nobody is enforcing that division now, and you have been holding up your end of it. The written Word tells you to stand fast in liberty rather than be entangled again, while the Holy Spirit does not divide a man into hands and no judgment.

What Is Not on Offer Here

There is a version of this that goes back down the garden after somebody, and it is not coming.

It would take the old arrangement apart. It would point out what it costs a site when the person who knows the ground best is never asked about the ground, which is true and which you could evidence with twelve years of examples.

It would also leave you heavier and still at the shed door. It would land on people who inherited a structure and never examined it, which is what everybody does with a structure.

You can be released from a division without prosecuting anybody for it. Scripture rests your freedom on what Christ has done rather than on anybody acknowledging anything, while the Holy Spirit lifts weight off a man instead of adding to it.

Nothing here asks you to raise it, make a point, or revisit twelve years. The garden gets lighter, and nobody else has to move first.

What Freedom in That Garden Is Not

There is a second version of this that goes badly wrong, and it is worth refusing before anybody offers it.

That version says you have been kept down, and that now you will get on the committee, take a role, run the site, and be recognized for twelve years at last. It measures freedom by scope.

That is not on offer. You might give an opinion and have it ignored. You might give one and be right and watch somebody else carry it. You might work out, thinking about it freely for the first time, that you would rather be on the ground than in a room, which is a perfectly good decision.

All three are free. Freedom is your judgment coming back under your own control, and what anybody does with it afterward is a separate matter.

You are free when the judgment is yours, whatever you then do with it. The written Word ties liberty to Christ rather than to a position, while the Holy Spirit gives a freedom that is complete before anybody asks you anything.

A man who is free and keeps doing exactly what he has always done, on the same beds, saying nothing at any meeting, has received the whole of this.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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