The Wall They Rebuilt Stone by Stone

There is about ninety yards of it gone and they are doing it over four weekends, and this is the second weekend, and the weather has been kind, which nobody expected.

Six of them plus a waller who is being paid and is worth every hour of it, a man of about seventy who says almost nothing and moves stone as though it were furniture.

Ross is forty-six and he is on carrying.

That is the job nobody wants and he took it because he is the youngest but one. The fallen stone is downslope, in the grass, spread over a long stretch, and it has to come up to the working face, and there is no way to get a barrow across that ground.

So it is a bag. Canvas, over the shoulder, one or two stones at a time, up a slope, forty times, fifty times.

It is killing him. He would not say so.

At about three the waller stops him on his way past, not out of kindness exactly, more the way you would stop somebody about to do something wrong to a tool, and takes a stone out of the bag and turns it in his hands and puts it into the wall.

And says, in about the eleventh sentence he has spoken all day: that one weighs nothing now.

Ross says something about it weighing plenty on the way up.

And the old man says, without looking up, the thing that follows Ross around for the rest of the year.

He says: a stone in a wall does not carry itself. It passes it on. Every stone in there is being held as much as it is holding. That is the whole of what a wall is.

Then he goes back to work, because he is being paid by the day and not to talk.

Ross stands on that hillside with an empty bag over his shoulder.

Because he has been a believer for twenty years and he has carried the whole of it in a bag.

Not badly. That is the thing. He has carried it faithfully, uphill, on his own, over rough ground, forty times a year for twenty years, and he has never once complained about it to anybody, and he has been wondering for about the last five of those years why something that is supposed to be a rest has got so heavy.

You have been carrying yours in a bag. Yours might be a different slope. But you know the weight, and you know you have been faithful about it, and you know you have not been able to explain to yourself why it feels the way it does.

Built up, which is a passive

First Peter has a passage about stones and a house, and the grammar of it does most of the work.

Ye also, as lively stones, are built up a spiritual house, an holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices, acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.1 Peter 2:5

Are built up.

That is passive. It is something done to the stones by somebody else. A stone does not build itself into a wall; it is lifted, turned, sighted, and set, by a person who can see where the whole thing is going.

You are being built up, and the verb is passive and the builder is not you. That is the written word and not my sympathy on a slope, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about a house and lays it on a hillside at three in the afternoon.

And then the noun. A spiritual house.

Singular. One structure. Peter does not say the stones are made into a collection or a pile or a set of well maintained individual stones kept in good condition. They are built up a house, which is a thing that has an inside and holds a roof and stands up because of how the parts sit against each other.

Which is exactly what the old man said about the wall, and he was not preaching.

The stone He starts with

Read the verse before it, because Peter does not start with you.

To whom coming, as unto a living stone, disallowed indeed of men, but chosen of God, and precious.

The living stone in that passage is Christ. He is named first, and the strange phrase belongs to Him first: a stone that is alive.

And then, in the next verse, ye also, as lively stones.

Your identity as a stone is derived from His. You are not a stone that has been assembled with other stones into a promising arrangement. You are a stone described by the same word as the cornerstone, set into a house He is building, and Peter says three verses later that He is the head of the corner, which is the stone that decides the angle of every wall that meets it.

This is yours, and the whole house is set against a stone that was chosen and precious, and it is already settled. First Peter 2 calls Him the living stone and then uses the same word for you, and the same Spirit who moved Peter to write it is the one making it a present fact in a man with an empty canvas bag over his shoulder.

Now let me guard this, because this site does not turn belonging into attendance and I am not going to now.

A wall is not a meeting. Being built into a house is not the same as being at something on a Sunday, and there are men reading this on a hillside somewhere with no wall in reach and no crew and nobody within an hour, and every word of that passage is still true of them. Built up is passive; it does not wait on your logistics.

And I am not telling you the twenty years of carrying were wasted. They were not. You carried it faithfully and God saw every trip up that slope and none of it is going to be lost.

I am telling you what the old man told you, which is that a stone in a wall is held as much as it holds, and that you have been doing something with yours that a stone was never designed for.