I Inherited The House And The Scoreboard

The line runs along the top of the west field and you have stood at it more times this year than you would care to say.

You go up there in the evening sometimes, and you look across at what used to be the Hallorans and is now somebody else's, and you do the thing.

You know the thing. Acres. What they put in this year. Whether the new man has done something you would not have done, and what that would have cost, and how it compares.

And every single one of those thoughts arrives in your father's voice.

Not his exact words. His shape. The particular way he had of noticing another man's ground, which he did every evening of his life without ever once saying he was doing it.

He has been gone two years. The place came to you and it was not a surprise and you have run it well.

And what came with it, in the same envelope, was a way of looking at a fence line, and you have been using it all year without ever having decided to.

Two things in one inheritance

Let me separate what you got, because they arrived together and they are not the same kind of object.

The place came to you. That is land and buildings and work, and it is yours, and it is being run well.

And an instrument came with it. A way of reading a boundary and turning it into a standing, which was in this house before your birth and which got in the way a boy absorbs everything, by watching a man do it every evening for eighteen years without a word of explanation.

The first one he meant to leave you. The second one he did not.

You have received two things and only one of them was intended, and a habit absorbed by a boy has never once been a thing he agreed to. The Holy Spirit is the one standing at a fence line with you in the evening, and it is written in Proverbs 30 that a man asked for food convenient for me.

And I want to say something about your father, because I am not going to let this become a piece about a man who cannot answer.

He did not use that instrument on you. Whatever he did with the Hallorans' ground, he did not turn it round and hold you up against another man's son. You know that, and it is worth saying out loud once, because an article like this can very easily turn into a man being tried in his absence by somebody who never met him.

The instrument was not malice. It was probably fear, and it was probably his father's before it was his.

You have a thing that came down a line rather than a thing that was done to you, and a habit older than the man who handed it on has never once been his to answer for alone. Proverbs 30 has a man asking for neither poverty nor riches, and the Spirit of God is the one who let that be a prayer rather than a rebuke.

Feed me with food convenient for me

Here is the prayer, and it is one of the only ones of its kind in the book.

Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain. (Proverbs 30:8, King James Version)

Food convenient for me.

Convenient there does not mean easy. It is an older use meaning fitted, suitable, the right amount for this particular man.

And notice what he is asking for. Not more. Not the most. A portion measured against himself and his own capacity, with reasons attached that are about his own soul rather than about anybody else's holding.

That is a man asking to be measured against his own life, which is the one measurement your instrument cannot make.

You have a prayer available that measures a man against himself, and no instrument handed down a family has ever once been able to do that. The Holy Spirit is the one who kept the whole thing local, and the written word asks for a portion fitted to one man and gives reasons about his own soul.

And look at what is absent from that prayer, because the absence is the point.

You have a way of standing at that line that needs nobody else's ground in it, and a prayer with one life in it has never once been a narrower prayer. Proverbs 30 asks for a portion fitted to one man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who left every neighbor out of the request.

There is no other farm in it. Nobody else's ground appears anywhere. The man is not asking for enough to hold his position relative to a neighbor, and the dangers he names are both internal.

That is a completely different way of standing at a fence line, and it does not require you to think worse of anybody.

You are able to ask for what is fitted to you rather than what holds a position, and a prayer with nobody else's ground in it has never once been a smaller prayer. Proverbs 30 names only internal dangers, and the Spirit of God is the one who put the whole request inside one life.