The Hearting in the Wall

The wall along the top of the field came down in three places over one winter, and Rob had been working on the middle gap since the start of March.

From the lane it did not look like work, and that is the first thing to understand about it. A drystone wall has two faces, an outer skin and an inner skin, each built from the big flat stones a person notices and comments on. Between those two faces runs a cavity about the width of a forearm. Into that cavity goes the hearting: a whole day's worth of small ugly stone, chips and wedges and offcuts, packed in tight by hand, each piece angled so the water runs out of the wall and the weight runs down through it. Nobody sees one fragment of it. Not ever again.

Rob spent nine days on hearting in that middle gap. Nine.

The farmer's daughter came up on the quad on the fourth of those days, looked at the wall, looked at him, and asked in the flat way of a fifteen year old with somewhere better to be what exactly he had done since Tuesday.

Rob has been asked this by the children of three counties. He gave the answer he always gives. He said: the middle.

She said it looked the same as Tuesday.

He said it does look the same as Tuesday, and then he said the thing worth carrying down out of that field. He said: the face is what a wall looks like, and the hearting is what a wall is. Build a beautiful face and fill the middle with rubbish and you get four winters, and then you get a heap of stone in the bottom pasture and a very expensive morning. Pack the middle properly and nobody can point at a single thing I did up here, and your grandchildren will lean on it.

You have an address.

Four years now, and it is the first one that has ever carried your own name on the lease instead of somebody else's kindness. Before it there were the sublets, the box rooms, the friends who said stay as long as you need and meant it, the being careful in other people's kitchens, and that particular tiredness of never once putting a mug down without first working out whose mug it was.

And in four years, by your own reckoning, nothing about you has changed.

Same flinch when an unknown number comes up. Same habit of mentally packing a room while sitting in it. The four boxes from the last move are still stacked along the wall behind the door, and by now they are furniture. Four years is long enough that something should have shown by now, and nothing has, and somewhere in the last few months you arrived quietly at the only conclusion that seemed to fit the evidence.

The conclusion was that the rooting never took in you.

What a wall actually is

Let me put a different instrument in your hands, because the one you carry was never built to read this.

The instrument is visibility. It is the only gauge most of us are ever handed, and it works beautifully on faces. It reads a new job, a repainted room, a body that moves better, a laugh that comes quicker. Hold it up against four years of hearting and it reads nothing at all, because there is nothing on the face to read. A zero on an instrument that only measures faces is not a verdict on the wall. It is a comment on the instrument.

Now hear what the book of Proverbs does with this, because it is one line and it is very precisely built.

The root of the righteous bears fruit.Proverbs 12:12

Proverbs 12:12 does not say the root of the righteous is admired. It does not say the root is inspected, or measured, or so much as seen. It says the root bears. So you are held today by something that was never on show, and the Spirit is saying that over a man who has spent four years reading his own front face and finding it exactly as it was.

Read the whole proverb and the shape of it comes clear. The line is a contrast, and the contrast is not between a fruitful man and a barren one. It is between what gets grabbed at and what gets grown. One half is a man reaching for whatever he can see and get his hands round. The other half is a root: underground, unphotographed, doing the one thing a root does, which is hold on and draw up. The two are set side by side and the reader is left to notice which of them has a future in it.

I have no standing of my own to tell a man that four flat years counted for something. Colossians 2:7 has that standing, and it uses two verbs that both happen out of sight: rooted, and built up. You are rooted in Him right now, at this address, in a flat with four boxes behind the door, and the Holy Spirit is the One making that land in you rather than my saying it twice.

Notice what the sentence does not do. It does not schedule anything. It sets no rate, names no season, hands you no month by which the visible part is due. What is written is a standing condition, not a countdown, and a man can live in a standing condition without ever checking the clock again.

And that is not my private read on your last four years. That is what the Spirit has been pressing into you through Colossians 2 the whole time the boxes have been sitting there: you have the whole of Christ, not a portion of Him held back pending progress. He was never handed over in pieces.

The order the word keeps

You have been told, kindly and by people who love you, that four years should have shown something by now. Nothing in Scripture agrees with them. The written word puts the root first and the fruit after, every single time it takes the subject up, and His Spirit has never once run that sequence backwards to satisfy somebody's timeline.

Which leaves the four boxes behind your door as what they actually are: boxes. Not a diagnosis. Not the tell that the whole thing was rented rather than owned. A man can be thoroughly rooted and still have cardboard against a wall, because the two facts live at completely different depths and only one of them is load bearing.

The Holy Spirit has been packing the middle of you for four years, handful by handful, and Proverbs 12:12 is the ground He does it on. You were rooted before you had a single feeling about it, and a root has never once asked the man whose field it is in for confirmation that it took.

What that root does with what it holds is His business and His timing, and it is not a date anybody owes you. That is the honest half, and it is also the restful half, because it means the four years were never an audition you were failing.