He Knows the Grain of the Wood

The wind up on that ground does not stop, it only changes its mind, and Marcus has been out on the fence line since about eleven.

Forty rails to replace along the top boundary, and he is doing it properly, which means slowly.

He is fifty-two. He can do this in his sleep. The rhythm of it is: pick up a rail, sight along it, decide which way it wants to go, put it up that way.

Because a rail is not a straight thing. It looks straight in a stack. Pick one up and sight along the edge and you find it has an opinion: a curve in it, a twist, a place where the grain runs out at the end and will split if you drive a nail into it there.

You could force it. You can absolutely force a rail. You put it up the wrong way round and drive the nail into the run-out and hold it flat, and it will hold for eleven months and then it will let go in a wind exactly like this one.

So he does not force them. He works with the grain, every rail, forty of them, and it takes twice as long, and he has never once considered doing it any other way, because that is what a person who works wood actually does.

At about half past three he is sighting along one and he stops.

Because there is a standard he holds himself to.

He could not tell you where he got it and he has never written it down. It is a running assessment, and it has been running since he was about twenty-five, and it goes: a man who genuinely belonged to God would not still be like this at fifty-two.

And it makes no allowance for anything. It does not care that he did not sleep. It does not care that the whole of March was what it was. It does not care what he is made of, at all, in any respect, and it never has.

He has been sighting along rails for thirty years and forcing himself flat the entire time.

You have that standard. Yours has different wording. But you know how it deals with you, and you know it has never once taken account of your grain.

He knows it because He made it

Psalm 103 is the psalm about mercy and it is written by a man who had a great deal to be merciful about, and near the middle of it there is a verse that says something about God's information.

For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

He knoweth our frame.

The word behind frame is the potter's word, the same root as the word used in Genesis when God formed a man out of the ground. It is a making word. So the sentence is not saying God has observed us carefully and drawn conclusions. It is saying He knows what we are made of because He is the one who made it.

He sighted along the rail before He put it up.

You are known by the One who formed you, and He has never once been working from an estimate. That is the written word and not my sympathy on a fence line, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a psalm about mercy and lays it on high ground with the wind going through the grass.

And then the second half, which is stranger and better.

He remembereth that we are dust.

Remembers. Which means in the moment He is dealing with you, that information is present to Him. It is not filed somewhere. It is not a fact about humanity in general that gets applied at the end if there is time. He is remembering it while He is looking at you, this afternoon, on this ground.

The knowing made Him tender. It did not make Him lower anything.

Now read the verse immediately before it, because it tells you what the knowing produces, and this is the distinction that has to be exact or the whole thing goes wrong.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him.

Pitieth. It is a tenderness word. In the Hebrew it is the word for a father's gut response toward a child, the thing that happens in a man's chest before he has thought about it.

So the knowing of the frame does not produce a lowered standard. Nowhere in that psalm does God say: given what they are made of, I will expect less. What it produces is tenderness in how He deals with what He expects.

That distinction is the whole of this article and I want it to land properly, because you are a man who would smell a lowered bar in about four seconds and would rightly want nothing to do with it.

He is not grading you down. He is handling you with knowledge of the grain.

You are dealt with by Someone who knows what you are made of and is tender with it, and that is already settled. Psalm 103 puts pitieth in the verse before knoweth on purpose, and the same Spirit who inspired that psalm is the one making it a present fact in a man with a rail in his hands.

Let me guard this the way you would want it guarded.

I am not saying the standard is wrong to exist. Something in a man that wants him to be better is not the enemy and I am not going to talk you out of it.

I am saying yours is running blind. It makes no allowance for anything, ever, and God's dealing with you is explicitly described as informed by what you are made of. Which means your standard is harder on you than God is, and it has been for twenty-seven years, and there is no verse anywhere that authorizes it.

And this last thing plainly: a heavier pull does not mean a weaker standing. Nothing in Scripture measures a man's belonging by what he is up against, and there is no league table of what people carry, and there never has been.