The Rain Gauge on the Gate Post

There is a plastic rain gauge zip tied to the gate post at the top of Colin's yard, and a brass one that was his father's on the windowsill inside, and he reads both.

He is a measuring man. Always has been. He can tell you what fell in the third week of any month you care to name, and if he cannot he will go out to the shed and read it off the back of the door where he pencils it in. He knows his stocking rates and his cutting dates. He weighs things. He does not guess.

That is not a fault in him. It got the place through.

Last Thursday he came in from the yard in his socks, because his boots were off in the porch, and his wife was on the telephone in the hall with her sister and did not hear the door.

She said: he is easier now.

She said it plainly, the way you say a thing you have already thought about. He is easier to live with than he was.

And Colin stood in his own porch with a boot in each hand and did not move.

Then he did the only thing he knows how to do with new information. He went and checked.

He went back out to the yard and he audited himself, thoroughly, the way he would walk a field before a decision. Is he easier. Well. He still went round the buildings three times on Tuesday night, and he knew he was doing it the second time and did it a third. He still spoke to the dog in a way he did not care for. He still cannot sit at a table through a whole meal without getting up for something that does not need getting.

Nothing. He came up with nothing.

He read himself the way he reads the gauge on the gate post, and the tube was dry.

So he has arrived at the tidy conclusion available to a man like him, and he has filed it and told nobody. She is being kind. She is a kind woman and she has had a hard three years and she is being kind about him, and he is not going to embarrass either of them by mentioning it.

Here is where Colin steps out of the yard, because somebody has said a thing like that to you.

It might not be a wife on a telephone. It might be a daughter saying you seem better, or a man at the back of a room saying you look like yourself again, or somebody who has known you thirty years telling you something has lifted. And you went straight inside to check, and found nothing, and quietly wrote it off as kindness.

You cannot see it. That is the whole trouble. And what you cannot see, you have never in your life agreed to believe.

The man is not the instrument

James puts a farmer in the middle of an instruction about patience, and it is worth looking at what the farmer is actually doing, because it is less than you would expect.

He waits. James 5:7 says the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the land, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rains, and that is the entire job description. He is not out there twice a day taking readings to establish whether the waiting is working. He is not auditing the field. You are the one waiting in that verse, not the one reporting on it, and the Spirit put that sentence there for a man standing in a porch in his socks with a boot in each hand.

Be patient, then, brothers and sisters, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the land, being patient over it until it receives the early and the late rains.James 5:7

That is not my flattering read of your temper. That is what the Spirit has been pressing through 2 Corinthians 4:16 the whole time you were out there checking: the inner person is being renewed day by day. Day by day is the reason you found nothing. Nothing that moves at the speed of a day is visible to the man it is happening to, and you are being renewed at a rate no instrument in your shed was ever built to pick up.

Think about what you would need in order to see it. You would need to stand outside yourself and look in, at two points far enough apart to make a difference, with an accurate memory of the first one. Nobody has that. A man's memory of what he was like three years ago is written by the man he is now, which makes it the least reliable record on the farm.

I have no business telling a man what is going on inside him, and I am not going to pretend I can see it from here. Philippians 1:6 can say it, and it says He who has begun a good work in you will complete it, and notice where the confidence in that sentence is placed. Not in the work. In the worker. You have a good work in you that somebody else started and somebody else finishes, and His Spirit has been doing it in a farmhouse at half past six in the morning for two years without asking your opinion.

Now, your conclusion. She is being kind. It is the tidiest answer available to a man who trusts instruments, and I want to take it off the table without putting hers on it instead.

Because 1 Samuel 16:7 removes both readings at once. It is not as a man sees, says the Lord, for a man looks upon the eyes, but the Lord looks upon the heart. Her sentence in the hall is not the proof and your dry tube is not the disproof, and the Spirit is not asking you to swap one unreliable gauge for another one. You are read accurately by God, in the one place neither of you can get at, and that reading is not up for revision by anything you failed to find on Tuesday.

Look again at what James calls the thing the farmer waits on. The precious fruit of the land. Precious is doing work in that sentence, and it is not the farmer's cleverness that made it so. The early rain came and the late rain came, and neither of them arrived on his say so or at his convenience, and he could not have made either one fall by standing in the field wanting it. You have early rain and late rain on you that you did not schedule, cannot measure and did not arrange, and the Spirit is the one who sends both, exactly as the word says the Lord does.