Six Names At The Gate

It is ten past six and there are twelve of them standing at the gate, and the ganger has not come out of the portacabin yet.

They can all see the field from where they are. The far corner has water sitting on it, silver in the early light, and every one of them knows what that means before anybody says it out loud. The rain came through at about two. She heard it on the caravan roof and lay there in the dark doing the week in her head.

The door goes. He comes out with the list and he is not unkind about it, he never is. Half a day, he says, and I can take six.

He reads six names. Hers is not one of them, and that is the fourth morning this week her name has not been read, and she knows the number because when your week is made of days that either happen or do not, you count them.

She says thanks, because he is only the man holding the list and the sky is the sky. Then she walks back down the track. There is a heron standing perfectly still in the wet corner of that field and she stops and watches it for a minute, because it is beautiful, and because there is no hurry now.

And she prayed on the way up that track this morning. Nobody at the gate knows that part. The same words she has prayed for four summers, said quietly into the hedge, and then the list was read.

If you have ever prayed on your way to a gate like that one, this is written for you.

The list is not a verdict

I want to say the honest thing first, because somebody should have said it to you four summers ago and said it plainly.

Faith does not move weather. It did not put your name on that list this morning, and the praying you did coming up the track did not fail, because it was never a lever and it was never meant to be pulled. There is no arrangement in the whole of Scripture where a believing person's field drains and an unbelieving person's field floods.

I know how that lands when you are halfway back down the track with the morning gone. It can sound as though I have just told you the praying was pointless, and I want to be careful here, because that is not what it means and the second half of this weighs as much as the first.

So hear this while you are standing there with your name unread. You are not on trial at that gate. That list is not a report on your trust, and I am not handing you my private opinion about it: Hebrews 11:39 says of a whole chapter of believing people that they were commended through their faith and did not receive what was promised, and the Holy Spirit is the One who put those two facts inside one sentence, in that order, so that no believer in any century would have to choose between them.

The heavier thing was never the half day anyway. It is the thought that arrives on the walk home, the one you have never said to anybody: that a real believer, a proper one, would not still be counting the days that did not happen. That there is a key somebody forgot to hand you.

That thought is a lie, and it is the one thing on this page I am not going to be gentle about. It has been taking something off you every week for four summers and it has no business being there.

What your faith is actually holding

Let us look at what it is doing instead, because it is not nothing, and nobody standing at that gate is in any position to value it.

Your faith is why you prayed coming up the track on a morning when you could already see the silver in the corner of that field from the road. It is why you said thanks to the man with the list. It is why you have not concluded that God is a fiction, which is honestly the tidier position from where you are standing.

You have been holding on to God through a stretch that has loosened the grip of people with far easier lives, and the written word does not file that under small faith. It calls it endurance, and it calls the one who does it blessed (James 1:12). The same Spirit who has been holding you up in it is not standing off to the side with a clipboard, grading you.

And there is something of yours in this that the weather cannot reach at all. You are in Christ, and what you are worth was settled by what He paid rather than by what any week produces, and His Spirit bears witness to that with your spirit on the mornings you cannot feel a thing (Romans 8:16). A wet corner in a field has no access to that. It was never in the field.

The chapter that ends with empty hands

Read the end of Hebrews 11 slowly one evening, when the caravan is quiet.

It is the famous chapter, the one people quote for the shut mouths of lions and the walls that came down. And then it turns, and it lists the others: people who were sawn in two, who went about in sheepskins and goatskins, destitute, wandering in deserts and mountains and in dens and caves of the earth. And then the sentence that closes it. All these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised.

Commended. That is God's own word for them, and He put it on the ones with nothing in their hands.

You are already inside that sentence and you did not have to qualify for it. The written word does not say they had a lesser faith with a smaller yield. It says the same faith, and no delivery, and God's own commendation over the top of both, and the Spirit who inspired that verse is the same Spirit who was with you on the track this morning. That is what your faith is. It is real, it is spoken well of in heaven, and it is not a lever.