The Barn Door I Walk Past

The barn is full.

Not fullish. Full. Stacked to the purlins across the whole width of it, right back into the dark end where Norman had to put a plank across two pallets to walk on. It came in dry. It came in green. It smells the way the good stuff smells, and every man who has come into that yard in the last fortnight has said something about it before he has said hello.

The doors are open, because they always are in August. You can see the whole face of it from the gate.

And Norman has not stood in that doorway once.

He goes past it eleven or twelve times a day, and every time he goes past he is going somewhere. That is the trick of it. He is never idling past the barn, he is always on his way to a job, and the jobs are getting thinner. Yesterday he re-hung a door that hangs perfectly well. The day before he went up the top to look at a fence that has been standing since March and will stand until Christmas. He walks past the open doors with his eyes down on the yard, at a pace, the way a man walks past somebody he does not want to be drawn into conversation with.

His wife caught him at the end of it on Sunday. She had come out with the tea and she stood in the doorway looking up at it and she said, come and stand here a minute.

He said he would in a bit. He said it kindly. And he went and did something to the loader.

Now, Norman would tell you he is fine, and he is fine. The place is fine. Nobody is chasing him. There is nothing in the post he is afraid of this month, which is not something he could have said in a long while.

But he cannot stand in that doorway, and he knows exactly why, though he has never put it in a sentence.

It is not superstition. He is not a superstitious man and he would be offended if you suggested it. It is arithmetic. It goes like this. If he stands there and lets himself look at it properly, he will want it. And if he wants it, then whatever happens next will cost him more than it would have cost a man who never stood there at all.

So he keeps his eyes on the yard. He is not refusing the barn. He is just refusing to want it.

Here is where Norman steps out of the yard, because you have one of these somewhere and you know where you look instead.

It might not be a barn. It might be a Sunday afternoon where the house is quiet and nobody needs anything and you get up and find a job. It might be a person sleeping in the room over your head, and you have not let yourself stand at the top of the stairs and simply be glad. It might be a run of ordinary weeks with nothing wrong in them, and the fact that you have not once said out loud that it is good.

Something good is standing right behind you. And you have arranged your whole day so that you never have to turn around and face it.

Permission, and who it comes from

Ecclesiastes 5:18 does something I did not expect the first time I read it slowly. It calls enjoyment fitting.

Good and fitting is the phrase. It is good and fitting to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun, the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his portion. Not indulgent. Not risky. Not tempting anything. You are standing inside a sentence that calls looking at your own barn a fitting thing for a man to do, and the Spirit is saying it into the middle of a fortnight of invented jobs.

Look, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his portion.Ecclesiastes 5:18

Then the next verse does something better than that, and this is the part I want in your hands before anything else.

It says the power to enjoy what a man has been given, to accept his portion and to rejoice in his toil, is itself the gift of God. Not the reward for enjoying properly. The gift, handed over with the thing. That is not me giving you leave, which would be worth nothing, it is the Spirit saying through Ecclesiastes 5:19 that the capacity you think you have lost was issued to you along with the barn. You have been handed two things and you have only ever unwrapped one of them.

Now the arithmetic. I want to look at it straight, because it is not stupid and it deserves better than being called negative thinking.

If I do not look, it will cost less when it goes. That is the sum. And the trouble with it is not that it is grim, it is that it does not work. Not looking has never once made a loss smaller. What it does is remove the part that was actually yours to have, in advance, on the chance that the other part comes. A man doing that sum pays twice and collects nothing.

I have no authority at all to tell a man it is safe to love something. Nobody has. If I told you that, I would be writing you a promise out of my own pocket, and no one who reads this can pay it. James 1:17 has the authority I do not: every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. You are held by One who does not vary, and His Spirit says that over you whether the barn is full in twelve months or standing empty.

That is the honest ground, and it is better ground than a good forecast, because a forecast can turn.

Notice, too, that Ecclesiastes is not naive about any of this. The man writing it had just spent an entire chapter on what does not last and cannot be carried away, and then, having said all that, he says eat your bread and find some enjoyment in the work. He is not asking you to pretend the barn is permanent. Nobody is. The word never says the season repeats.

And look at the word he chooses for it. Portion. That is a countryman's word, and it means the piece set aside for a man by somebody else's decision, not the amount he negotiated. A portion is not a forecast and it is not a wage. It is what has been put in front of you today. You have a portion standing in a barn with the doors open, allocated by God, written down in Scripture as fitting to enjoy, and the Spirit is standing in that doorway with you while you look at it.