Two Full Barns and the Same Knot

Dell walked both barns on the second Sunday in November, the way he does, and both of them were full, and he came back to the house feeling exactly the way he felt the year they were empty.

That is a hard thing to say out loud in a county where a lot of people are not having a good year. He knows it. He has not said it to anybody, and he will not, and that is part of what this is.

It has been three good years. Three. Not one lucky one. Prices held, the weather behaved itself twice out of three, and he made two decisions in his forties that turned out to be the right ones, which is not something he takes credit for and not something he can quite believe either.

The note is paid ahead. There is money set aside that has a name on it, for the roof, and it has been sitting there untouched for eighteen months.

And on the second Sunday in November he stood in the door of the second barn with the light coming in low behind him, and the knot was exactly where it always is, about two inches under the breastbone, the same size and the same weight as it was in the winter he sold the truck.

He came in and washed his hands and did not say anything about it at dinner.

What got him was his wife, later, in the kitchen, not looking up from what she was doing. She has been married to him for thirty-one years and she said, in the voice she uses when she has decided something: Dell. You have been walking those barns like a man checking a wound. They are full. When are you going to come inside?

When are you going to come inside.

Dell stood in his own kitchen with a dish towel in his hands and could not answer her, and he could not have said one word about it to any man in that county.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the barns.

He thought: I have been farming out of that winter for eleven years, and my own wife has just asked me to come in from it.

Let me say the word plain

Before we go on I want to say plain what this site means by wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a yield, not two full barns. A portion is the old table word for what gets set down in front of a man because he belongs at that table, and Scripture takes that plain word and does a startling thing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only meaning the word carries here.

And this piece is written for one particular man, so let me be exact. It is for the one who has enough and cannot feel it. If your barns are actually empty this year, if the note is due and the knot is telling you the truth, then nothing on this page is asking you to make peace with that, and any article that did would deserve burning. Real lack is real and it wants a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is a full barn and a knot that did not get the news, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

You have been inside this the whole time. Scripture says so, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that more than information.

A man who prayed for exactly enough

Agur prays one of the oddest prayers in the whole book, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to men in barn doors ever since.

Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.Proverbs 30:8-9

Read what he asks for and notice he is not being modest for the sake of it. He asks not to be poor because he knows what poverty does to a man. And he asks not to be full for the same reason, because he knows what a full barn does to a man, which is that it quietly takes over the job of being God.

Feed me with the food that is needful for me. That is a request for a daily arrangement, not a stock. It is a man asking to be fed rather than to be covered, and there is a whole world of difference between the two words.

You are not an ungrateful man. You are somebody whose body learned in one particular winter that the difference between all right and not all right is what is standing in a barn, and it has been running on that ever since regardless of what is standing in there now. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a proverb and actually coming in from a barn.

And here is what is true this evening, before the price of anything is settled: you have today. The word says feed me with the food that is needful, and today's is on your table, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact a man can feel under the breastbone rather than only agree to.

What the walking is actually asking

Think about what got you at the sink. It wasn't what she said about the barns. You'd have told her the exact figures.

It was: when are you going to come inside. It was somebody who has watched you for thirty-one years telling you where you have actually been living. You were starving to be called in. You still are, and there is nothing soft about that in a man of your age, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the walking. The barn is not being checked for grain. It is being asked to promise that the winter you sold the truck in will not come back, and no barn on this earth can promise that, which is exactly why walking it does not settle you.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never handed the job of guaranteeing the weather. God did not put you on that. Jesus stood in a boat in a storm that frightened professional fishermen and slept through most of it, and He was in that barn door with the low light behind you.