The Forty Yards to the Barn

It is forty yards. He measured it once with a tape for a job he was pricing and it came out at thirty eight and he has called it forty ever since.

He walks it eight times a day in the winter and more than that in calving.

There is no path. There never has been. His grandfather did not put one in and his father did not and he has thought about it maybe fifteen times and never done it, and by the second week of November there is a channel worn into the ground that fills with whatever the sky has been doing.

Merle is fifty nine. He has a pair of boots for that walk and a pair for everything else, and there is a bootjack by the back door his wife put in eleven years ago and it was one of the best things anybody has ever done for him.

He is never clean at the end of it. Not once, in fifty nine years, has he crossed those forty yards and arrived the way he left.

He said that out loud in the truck about two years ago and then sat there for a while, because he had not meant it about the mud.

If your week is forty yards of mud eight times a day, this is written for you. And I want to give you a verse that most people quote, and then the one after it that they do not, because the one after it is where the whole weight goes.

The prayer nobody finishes

Here is the verse people quote.

And the very God of peace sanctify you wholly; and I pray God your whole spirit and soul and body be preserved blameless unto the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

That is an enormous prayer. Wholly. Spirit and soul and body. Preserved blameless. It is about as big an ask as anybody makes anywhere in the New Testament, and a man who is never clean at the end of forty yards reads that and knows exactly how far off it he is.

Here is the next verse.

Faithful is he that calleth you, who also will do it.

Who also will do it.

Paul makes the biggest request in the letter and then, immediately, in one short sentence, assigns the doing to somebody else. Not to the Thessalonians. Not to the reader. To the one who calls, and he grounds it in that one's faithfulness rather than in anybody's effort.

You have a prayer whose doing is assigned in the next line to the one who calls. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 makes the request and the following verse names who performs it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written assignment and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands out in a yard.

And that is the answer to a man's arithmetic about a week.

Because the assumption underneath being never clean at the end of forty yards is that keeping is a maintenance job, and that a life with a lot of mud in it involves more maintenance than a life without, and that a man in that kind of life is at a structural disadvantage.

The verse takes maintenance off the table. It does not distribute the work more fairly. It moves it.

You have had the doing moved rather than distributed. It is written as an undertaking by the one who calls, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written undertaking into a life, which is why it holds standing in a channel of water in November.

Preserved is a keeping word

There is a word in the prayer worth stopping on, because it is not what a man expects.

Preserved blameless.

Now, the natural reading is that a person is to be kept in a spotless condition, which for a man who works outdoors is an image with a certain comedy in it and a certain sting.

The word is about guarding and watching over. It is what you do with something valuable that you intend to still have later. It is not a word about condition at all. It is a word about custody.

So the prayer is not that a person be maintained in a state of cleanliness through the week. It is that they be kept, in the sense of held onto, and the following verse says who is doing the holding.

A man does not need to be spotless to be in somebody's custody. Those are unrelated facts.

You are in custody rather than under maintenance, and no amount of mud bears on custody. Scripture uses the guarding word rather than a word about condition, and the same Spirit at work in that letter is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the walk has gotten longer than forty yards in your head, if the never arriving clean has spread into a general account of your life, 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 tonight 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 mud is not a failing

Now the thing this category is for, and I want it said plainly out here.

The mud is not a failing.

A man who walks forty yards eight times a day is a man doing his work, and the ground is the ground, and there is no version of that walk in November that ends with clean boots, and God knew the shape of that job before He put anybody in it.

Nothing in Scripture grades a week by how clean a man arrives. There is no passage anywhere that measures a believer against the tidiness of his day, and if there were it would be a passage that favored people with indoor work and short walks, and nobody has ever wanted to write that doctrine down.

And a hard week cancels nothing. A week where you never once arrived the way you left has not reversed one thing that God declared, because a state that God declared is not the kind of thing a week can wear off.

You are in the same state at the barn that you were at the back door. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 asks for a keeping and the next verse assigns it, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you the walk gets easier or that a week comes when you arrive clean. You will not. That is the job.

You are clean right now standing in the middle of forty yards, and the ground has never once been a witness. It is written and it is undertaken, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes an undertaken thing real in a body.