We Sold the Forty and the Note Is Clear

Boyd signed the papers in August and he has driven past that fence line about two hundred times since and has never once looked at it.

It was the right decision. He wants that established because he will not have anybody suggest otherwise, least of all himself at three in the morning. The note had gotten away from them over four years that included one flood and one price collapse that nobody saw coming, and by the spring there were two roads and only one of them ended with them still farming.

So they sold the forty on the north side, which is the poorest ground they had, and the note is clear, and the place is theirs, and there is money set aside for the first time since the children were small.

His wife has never once been anything but steady about it. His banker, who is a decent man, said it was the smartest thing he had seen anybody do in that county in ten years.

And Boyd cannot look at the fence line.

It is not regret. He has turned it over enough to be sure. He would sign it again on Monday.

It is that he does not know what he is now. His grandfather bought that forty in 1948 and everybody in that family told the story of it at every funeral for seventy years, and Boyd sold it in an afternoon, correctly, and he has not been able to say a word about how that sits with him because every single word available makes him sound like a man who regrets a good decision.

What got him was his grandson, who is six, in the truck, going nowhere in particular. The boy was looking out of the window and he said: Papaw, is that ours?

And Boyd said no, son, that part is not ours anymore.

And the boy said, with no interest at all, already looking at something else: okay. Is the creek ours?

Is the creek ours.

Boyd drove about another quarter mile and had to find something to say about the creek, and he could not have explained it to any man in that county.

And the sentence that arrived, driving, had nothing to do with the note.

He thought: that boy will grow up on the ground we kept, and he will tell a story about the creek, and I have been standing in 1948 for a year deciding what I am.

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 deed, not the number of acres a man can walk. 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 let me be plain about something else before we go a step further. There is not one word on this page suggesting that selling the forty was a failure of faith, or that a better man would have held it and prayed harder. That would be a shameful thing to say to a man who kept his family farming, and it is not true, and I would not put my name on it. The sale was a real answer to a real problem and it worked, and I am glad of it and so is God.

What I want to do is narrower. I want to name what you sold that was never on the deed, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

You are the person that sentence was written for. That is what the word says, and His Spirit is the one who delivers it.

He carries a man all the way to gray hairs

Isaiah writes one verse where God says four things about Himself in a row, and every one of them is a verb about lifting.

Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.Isaiah 46:4

Read what is being described and notice what is not in it.

Made. Bear. Carry. Save. Not one word about acreage, or about a name on a deed, or about whether the ground a man works is the same ground his grandfather bought. God is describing an unbroken relationship with a person across a whole life, and He describes it as carrying.

Which is the opposite way round from how a man in that county thinks about it, and the difference matters more than anything else in this article. A man thinks he carries the place. The verse says the man is the one being carried, and has been since before 1948, and will be at gray hairs, and none of that is measured in acres because it never was.

You are not a man who regrets a good decision. You are a man who did something correct and then discovered that he did not know what he was without the thing he sold, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It puts the carrying on the other side, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a verse and being able to look at a fence line.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before one thing about that north forty changes hands again. You are met where the money could not reach. His word says I have made, and I will bear, present and settled, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact a man can feel rather than a line he can quote.

What was sold that was not on the deed

Think about what got you in that truck. It wasn't the question. Children ask a hundred questions.

It was: okay, is the creek ours. It was a six year old absorbing the loss of the forty in about a second and a half and moving straight on to the ground he will actually grow up on. You were starving to find out whether anything survives the sale, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as sentiment, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a man and not merely about him.

That is the honest thing under the fence line. It is not the ground. It is that you have been carrying a story since 1948 and the story had acres in it, and no clearing of any note could tell you who you are without them, which is not a failure of the sale.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. The story does not live in the deed. Jesus did not own a foot of ground anywhere and He is the one everybody in that family has been trying to follow the whole time, and He was in the truck for that whole quarter mile.