I Can See It In The Stock And Not In Me

He has a heifer in the bottom field that is coming on slowly and he is completely relaxed about it.

That is not a figure of speech. He genuinely is. She was late and she has been behind since, and if you asked him about her he would tell you she will come right, and he would say it without any anxiety whatsoever, because he has been doing this for forty-four years and he has seen a hundred of them come right and he knows the shape of it.

He would never dig up a hedge to see how the roots were doing. The idea would strike him as idiotic.

He put a shelter belt in twelve years ago and has not once measured it.

He is the most patient man on that road with every living thing on his ground.

And on Sunday, driving back from something, he said a short sentence to himself out loud in the cab that he has said before and did not think about until it was out.

He said: I am no different than I was.

And what he meant, and he knows exactly what he meant, is that there is a thing in him that he has been asking God about since roughly 1994, and it is still there, and he is sixty-seven, and there comes a point where a man has to be honest and stop expecting.

And he did not notice, because you do not notice this sort of thing about yourself, that he had spent the morning being entirely patient with a heifer that is behind, and the afternoon being entirely patient with a shelter belt he cannot see the top of any more, and about eleven seconds being savage with himself about thirty-one years.

And that is you in your own cab, or you would not still be reading.

The one comparison James reaches for

Here is a man writing to people who are worn out with waiting, and look at where he goes for the picture.

See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it, until it receives the early and the late rains.James 5:7

He does not reach for a soldier or an athlete, which is where Paul often goes. He reaches for a farmer, and he assumes his readers will find it obvious, because everybody in that world knew somebody who did what you do.

And notice what the farmer's patience is made of.

It is not resignation. He is not sitting there having given up. He is waiting for something, with a specific expectation, and the expectation is entirely reasonable because he knows what a field does.

And it is not measurement either. James does not describe him checking.

You already know how to do this and you have been doing it since you were twenty-three. It is written, see how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient about it (James 5:7). The Holy Spirit gave that picture to a letter for exhausted people because the thing you do on your own ground is the thing.

Now here is the part I want to put in front of you plainly, because you are a plain man and you would rather have it straight.

You have one field you treat differently.

Every other living thing under your care gets forty-four years of accumulated knowledge about how slow things work. Your own soul gets eleven seconds in a cab and a verdict.

You are applying a standard to yourself that you would call cruel if you saw a man use it on a beast. It is written that the Lord is compassionate and merciful (James 5:11), which James says four verses after the farmer, in the same passage, about the same waiting. The Holy Spirit is not harder on you than you are on a heifer that is behind.

And I am not going to tell you when the thing from 1994 will shift. I do not know. Nobody knows and a page that gives you a timescale for your own interior life is selling you something, and you would smell it at forty paces.

What I will say is what you already believe about every other slow thing.

You are not able to see this and you have never once been able to, and that is the ordinary condition rather than the bad sign. It is written that the seed sprouts and grows, he knows not how (Mark 4:27), and Jesus gives it as a description of how growing works rather than as a warning. The Holy Spirit is working in ground you cannot open up, in a man who would never dig a hedge to check.