Perfect From the Road

Anybody driving out that way slows down a little at the corner and looks, because the fence along that stretch is the best on the county road and has been for thirty years.

Posts plumb. Wire tight. The gate hangs true and swings without a sound and closes on the latch first time, every time, which anybody who has hung a gate will tell you is not luck.

Behind the third rise, out where nobody goes, there are two hundred yards held together with wire.

Not dangerous. Curtis wants that understood and it matters to him. The stock are safe and he checks it and he would not run cattle behind a fence he did not trust. It is just that it has been patched fourteen times over twenty years and the last four of those patches were patches on patches, and if you walked it you would see a man who has been buying himself another season for a long while.

He is sixty six. He knows what it is a picture of and he has known for years.

He is a church man and it is not for show. He has sat with families through funerals and been the one who thought to bring a chair. Everybody in that valley would tell you something good about him.

He just knows what the back sections look like.

If that is your fence, this is written for you. And I want to give you one verb out of Proverbs, because it belongs to a weigher and not to a prosecutor, and the difference decides everything.

Pondereth is a weighing word

Here is the proverb.

Every way of a man is right in his own eyes: but the LORD pondereth the hearts.

The word behind pondereth is a weighing word. It is what you do with a balance and a set of weights. It is the language of an assayer or a merchant establishing what something actually is.

Now, most people hear that and brace, because a weighing in Scripture usually gets preached as a judgment scene and there is a famous one where a king comes up short.

But sit with what a weigher actually does for a minute, because it is not the same job as a prosecutor.

A prosecutor is trying to establish guilt. He has a direction he wants the result to go and he builds toward it. A weigher has no direction at all. A weigher wants the true figure, whatever it turns out to be, and would be equally troubled by a reading that came out too high or too low, because the whole of his trade is accuracy.

And that changes who the weighing serves.

You are being weighed by somebody whose entire interest is the true figure. Proverbs 21:2 uses the balance word rather than any word for accusing, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written weighing and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands out on a fence line.

Now think about what that means for a man who has been running his own scale for twenty years.

If God were a prosecutor, an accurate reading would be the worst thing that could happen to Curtis. If God is a weigher, an accurate reading is the best, because a man who has been marking himself down for about fifteen years has been carrying a figure that is not true, and a true weight would be lighter than the one he has been carrying.

You have been carrying a figure that nobody accurate ever gave you. It is written as a weighing and not as a charging, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written accuracy into a life, which is why it holds out where the wire is.

Right in his own eyes goes both ways

There is a first half to that proverb and it is usually read only one direction.

Every way of a man is right in his own eyes.

That gets taught as self flattery, and it is that, often. A man thinks well of himself and the proverb says his own eyes are not the instrument.

But read it plainly and it is a statement about the reliability of self assessment, and an unreliable instrument is unreliable in both directions. If a man's own eyes cannot be trusted to tell him he is worse than he thinks, they cannot be trusted to tell him he is worse than he is either.

That is not a technicality. A great many good and serious men run a scale that has been out of calibration in the downward direction for decades and never once think to question it, because they assume the error only runs one way.

The proverb does not say that. It says the eyes are not the instrument, and then it names the one that is.

You have an instrument that is not your own eyes, and your eyes have been out in both directions. Scripture states the unreliability without specifying a direction, and the same Spirit at work in that proverb is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the patching has spread past a fence, if the buying of another season has become how the whole place runs, if the nights have been getting long or the thinking has traveled out past regret toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Ring your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If today is a dark one, call or text 988 or a crisis line and let another human being be in it with you. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a soft spot in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people.

The road fence is not a lie

Now I want to say the thing I would most want said to me out there, and I want it plain.

The fence along the road is not a lie.

It is a good fence. It does its work. It holds stock, it marks a boundary, and the man who built it built it right, and the people who slow down at that corner are looking at thirty years of real craft and they are not being deceived about anything.

A fence is not a claim about the whole property. It is a fence. It holds where it stands.

And a man who has started to read his own road fence as a deception has made a mistake that costs him something real, because the good work out front stops being good work and becomes evidence, and after a while a man cannot enjoy anything he has made.

You built a good fence, and a good fence is not testimony about anything else. Proverbs 21:2 puts the weighing on the heart and never once turns the outside into an accusation, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you those two hundred yards get rebuilt this fall, or that the thing they picture resolves on any schedule. That is not mine to hand out.

You are clean right now with the back sections exactly as they are, and the wire has never once been a witness about you. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.