The Fence Post Where He Says It Every Year

There is a fence post at the corner of the top field that has been leaning the same amount since he was a boy, and he stops at it every October.

Not on purpose the first time. He was walking the line after the rain and he stopped because the wire was slack, and he found himself saying a short thing out loud, and then he went on and mended the wire. That was eleven Octobers ago.

The sentence has not changed much. It is about his father. It is about eight words long and it does not have any Scripture in it and he has never once said it in front of another human being.

His father is alive. That is the part that catches people out when he tries to explain it. His father lives forty minutes away and answers the phone and asks about the truck. They talk about the truck a good deal. What they do not talk about is the year the whole thing came apart, and neither of them has ever laid a hand on that door.

He has prayed better than that sentence, in his time. He has prayed with a preacher and he has prayed with his wife and he has prayed with a Bible open on the kitchen table and a pen in his hand. All of that was real. But when he gets to that post, what comes out is the eight words, because the eight words are the truest thing he has got.

And after service last month a good man, meaning it kindly, put a hand on his shoulder and said: son, have you ever thought about fasting over your daddy?

He said he would think on it. He has thought of little else since. And what he heard underneath a sentence that was meant as pure kindness was that after eleven Octobers there was still something he had not tried, and that the door in the middle of his family might be his to get open.

If you are the one who stops at the same place and says the same short thing, come and sit on the rail a minute.

Nobody up there is grading the wording

Get that settled before anything else, or you will read the rest of this with your jaw set.

You have not prayed this poorly, and you are not being held up while heaven waits on a better sentence. That is not a soft word from a man on a fence rail. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been carrying eight plain words into a country your vocabulary was never going to reach.

Here is what happens to a man who loves somebody across a shut door. The love does not go down. It has nowhere to put itself, so it turns into work, and praying stops being a conversation and turns into a chore you clock into. Then a good man adds one more chore, and you take it, because you would take about anything.

Somebody else is doing the talking

There is a verse in Romans that I would put on the gate of every farm I have ever worked, and it is not about technique.

Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as we ought: but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.Romans 8:26

Sit with the middle of it. We do not know what to pray for as we ought.

That is not written about the careless. It is written about the church, about people who were trying, and God put it in the book because He knew what it is to stand at a post with eight words and nothing else in the bucket.

You are not on your own in that sentence, and you never were. I did not make that up to make a farmer feel better: Paul wrote it plain, that the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered (Romans 8:26), and it is that same Spirit, and not my paragraph, doing the carrying while you stand there thinking you are getting nowhere.

So what is fasting, if it is not the thing that finally cracks a father open?

The plain answer, which is smaller

Fasting is not a payment and it is not a lever and it is not the piece that has been missing. It is not news sent up to a God who had not heard. It is a body brought into a prayer that was already going, the way a man puts his shoulder into a job his hands are already doing. It is the whole of you, the part that gets hungry and tired and stands in a wet field in October, turned toward God with nothing in your hands.

You will not get a plan off me. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work up to and nothing to complete. A plan is how a thing like this turns back into a trade, and a trade is exactly what has been wearing you down.

Now here is a thing I will say out loud and not in small print. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing off you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard road with eating, if you are underweight or unwell or you simply do not know, talk to your doctor before you go without anything, and let what they say be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a note from a surgery. The word says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once shown up in a smaller measure on account of somebody's body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can hold, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and call a real person: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not going around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.