The Signpost in the Hedge

Del is doing the lane hedge because nobody else is going to do it, and he has been at it since about eight, and it is one of those October days where you start in a coat and finish in a shirt.

Two hundred yards of hawthorn that has not been touched properly in a long time. He is going at it with a hook and a saw and a certain amount of language, and there is a pile on the verge behind him that is going to need a bonfire and a good Sunday.

At about half two the saw stops dead and rings.

Metal. He gets down and puts his glove in and feels round it, and it takes him twenty minutes with the hook to open the hedge enough to see what he has got.

It is a fingerpost. Cast iron, on a post set in concrete, the whole thing swallowed by twenty years of growth, the arm pointing off across the field at an angle nobody has followed in a very long time. He gets the moss off the arm with his thumb and the letters are still there, raised, deep, exactly as legible as the day they were cast.

Public footpath.

Del stands on that verge with his gloves off, breathing, and looks at where the arm is pointing, which is a stile with a bramble over it and a field beyond it and, if he remembers rightly, a way through to the church the other side that he has not walked since he was a lad.

The path never stopped existing. That is the thing that gets him and keeps getting him. It is still a right of way. It is still on the map. Nothing was ever revoked, nothing was closed, there was no decision anywhere by anybody. A hedge grew, slowly, for twenty years, and covered the sign, and people stopped walking a path because they could not see where it started.

He is sixty-two. And he is standing there thinking about a word.

He got it in a church he was taken to as a boy, and he got it as a warning. Holy was a word that came out when something was about to be said about how far short everybody was, and Del has spent forty years hearing it as a fence at the edge of a field he was not going into. He would not say he has a problem with it. He would say it is simply not for him, and never has been, and he has arranged his life accordingly.

Grown over. Not revoked.

You have got a fingerpost in your hedge. Yours might not be a word at all. But you know the difference between a thing being closed and a thing being covered, and you have never once put your glove in and felt around.

Isaiah calls it a road

Isaiah 35 is one of the most extravagant chapters in the book. The desert blossoms, water breaks out in the wilderness, the lame man leaps, the ransomed come home singing. And right in the middle of all that flourishing there is one line about our word.

And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.Isaiah 35:8

A highway. A way. The way of holiness.

Not a fence. Not a boundary at the edge of a field. A road, which is the kind of object that exists to be walked on and to get somebody somewhere, and which fails at being a road entirely if nobody is on it.

You have been given a road, and it is already yours to walk, and a road with nobody on it is not being respected, it is being wasted. That is the written word and not my read on your lane, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a chapter about a blossoming desert and lays it on a verge in October with a hook in your hand.

And then the clause that I would have put on the fingerpost if it had been up to me.

The wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

Read it again slowly. The road is built in such a way that a plain man walking, with no special qualification and no great wisdom, cannot get lost on it. That is a design feature. Isaiah is not saying it is a difficult path that fools will fail at. He is saying the opposite: this one is made so that ordinary people going along it do not go wrong.

You were handed that word as a maze with a wall round it. Isaiah calls it a road so plain you cannot miss the turn.

Look at what is growing on either side of it

Do not read that verse on its own, because the chapter it sits in is the whole argument.

Before it: the wilderness shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. Waters break out, and streams in the desert, and the parched ground becomes a pool.

After it: the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with songs and everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

That is the neighborhood our word lives in. Water, blossom, singing, a road home, and sorrow leaving the field.

This is yours, and the chapter it comes from is a chapter about flourishing, and it is already settled. Isaiah 35 puts the way of holiness between a blossoming desert and a singing homecoming, and the same Spirit who moved the prophet to write it is the one making that a present fact in a man standing on a verge with his gloves off.

Now let me be straight with you the way I would be over a gate. I am not telling you the word is soft. There is a line in that verse about the unclean not passing over, and it is there, and Isaiah is not being vague. The road is genuinely a road and it genuinely goes one way and not another.

But a road that goes one way is not a fence. Those are two different objects and you have been treating one as the other for forty years, and it has kept you off a right of way that was never once closed to you.

And the people who handed it to you as a warning were mostly handing on what they got. Somewhere back up that line there was a person who meant something true and said it in a hard year and it hardened. Nobody is being taken to court on this verge. There is a hedge, and a sign under it, and letters still as deep as the day they were cast.