The Long Way Round the Top Field

The gate at the top of the far field is the good gate. Oak, hung properly by somebody's grandfather, and it swings without being lifted, which is more than can be said for the rest of them.

He has not walked up to it in eighteen months.

He goes round the bottom track now. It adds four minutes and a wet stretch in February, and he has told himself it is easier on the tractor so many times that he has almost stopped noticing it is not true. The dog knows. The dog still goes up.

What happened at that gate took about eleven seconds. Ten to six on a Tuesday in March, the light just coming over the ridge, and he heard his own voice out loud, which shocked him, because he had not planned to say anything at all. One sentence, about the shake in his right hand, said to God, at a gate, with nobody in the world listening.

Then he came down and did the water and had his coffee. The shake was the shake. By the Friday he had started going round the bottom, and he has kept every appointment since, and he still does.

He can pray for anybody else. He prays at the men's breakfast on the second Saturday, standing up, no notes. Last spring he prayed for a woman at church who had been given the kind of news nobody wants, and his voice did not shake once, which is its own quiet joke.

And he has not been back up to the gate.

You have a gate. It might not be a gate at all. It might be the third stair, or the corner of a car park where you sat with the engine off, or the end of a bed at two in the morning. Some spot you go the long way round now, with a reason ready in case anybody asks. And what stops you is not a question about whether He can. You settled that long ago. What you cannot work out is how a person starts again.

Why the second time is heavier than the first

Let me say the thing left unsaid, because it will sit lighter in the room than it does in your chest.

The first time you asked, you spent something, and it was not faith. It was nerve. You got yourself up to the point of saying a real thing out loud to God, in your own voice, with nothing at all in your hand, and it cost you more than anybody watching would have guessed. Then the morning came and went and the thing was the same, and you started going round the bottom.

To ask a second time is to walk back and stand on that exact spot. Not to risk a fresh disappointment. To risk the same one, in the same place, at the same hour, in the same words. That is why it is heavier, and it was never a question of how much faith a man can muster on a given morning.

And there is something quieter underneath it, which nobody says out loud because it sounds ridiculous in daylight: some part of you has concluded that you get one ask. That you had your turn. That heaven took the request and filed it, and that coming back with the same thing is poor manners at best and arguing at worst.

Hear what Jesus said about that, and hear who wrote down why He said it.

At the top gate, read the sentence whole: "And he spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint" (Luke 18:1).

Luke gives you the purpose before he gives you the story. This is a parable told so that people would keep on praying and not give up. Then Jesus describes a widow and a judge who cares nothing for God and nothing for people, and she keeps coming to him, and in the end he does the thing she asks, for no better reason than that she keeps coming back.

You are welcomed at the gate with the same request today. The written Word opens the door before you reach the hill, and the Holy Spirit carries your worn words through it without demanding a better sentence.

Notice that the judge is not a picture of God. He is the opposite of God, put into the story so you can measure the distance between them. If even a man like that opens up to a voice that keeps returning, what exactly do you imagine your Father does with yours.

Then there is Bethsaida, and Bethsaida settles this in a way nothing else quite does.

They bring Him a blind man. He takes the man by the hand, leads him out of the village, puts His hands on him, and asks him whether he sees anything. The man looks up and says he can see people, but they look like trees, walking. Something has happened, and it is not finished.

So Jesus puts His hands on the man's eyes a second time.

Sit in that for a moment. The second touch comes with no correction attached. Nobody adjusts the wording. Nobody is told they should have believed harder the first time, and there is not a hint anywhere in it that the first touch fell short because of something in that man. It is the same Christ, the same hands, the same afternoon, going again.

You have no defective first asking to repair. The written account leaves blame outside the scene, and the Holy Spirit makes that mercy present at this gate while every answer remains God's.

So there is the answer about the wording. No better sentence is waiting to be found. Greater skill is not required this time. Bring the words brought before. The words were never the thing standing in the way.

It is honest to say, too, that asking again is not a lever. Paul asked three times about the thing that troubled him, and what came back was not the removal of it but grace, sufficient, and he wrote the number down. Nobody ever told him he had asked once too often. That count sits in the Word as the record of a man who kept coming back.

You are welcome to ask again because the written Word says to pray and not faint, and the Holy Spirit helps without demanding a better method.