The Ladder On Ray's Side Of The Fence

For eleven years the extension ladder lived on Ray's side of the fence and belonged to both of them.

That was the arrangement, more or less, and nobody had ever put it in words. Ray had the ladder. He had the post hole digger. In July Ray came over the property line with tomatoes he could not give away fast enough, and one January he stood out there in the sleet holding jumper cables on Ray's battery for twenty minutes until the old Buick caught. When his mother died, Ray's wife Charlotte sent a pan of something down the driveway before anybody in his own family had thought to call.

Eleven years of talking over a fence about gutters, hips, rain, a bad tire and whose dog it was.

Then in September a sign went up by Ray's mailbox.

I am not going to tell you what the sign said.

It does not matter here, and you have already filled it in with your own, which is exactly the point and the reason I am leaving it blank. Yours is the one this is about.

Nothing was said. There was no argument, no words over the fence, not one raised voice. He just found himself taking the trash out at a different hour. He started backing out of his own driveway without looking left. And when Ray was out with the mower he found a reason to be in the garage.

Then in October the gutters needed doing before the leaves came down for good.

The ladder was thirty feet away.

He got in his truck, drove eleven miles to the farm store, and bought his own.

Carried it home, set it against the house, cleaned the gutters, and put it in the barn where it has hung ever since on two pieces of angle iron he cut himself.

February the ice came.

Big limb off the hackberry between the two properties let go about six in the morning and came down square across both driveways, his and Ray's, neither one of them going anywhere.

They both came out around seven with saws.

Two hours in the cold. They said maybe nine words the whole time and every one of them was work. Lift. Hold it. Come around this side. He held the limb while Ray cut and Ray held the limb while he cut, and they dragged the whole of it back off the gravel and stacked it, and the sun came up over the fence line while they were doing it.

At the end of it Ray stood there with his glove off, wiping his face.

And he said, "You still got that digger?"

Standing in his own driveway with a saw hanging off his hand, the man understood something that took the wind out of him.

The door was not latched from Ray's side.

It had been latched from his.

You know that thirty feet.

Maybe it is not a fence. Maybe it is a brother, a table you stopped going to, a name you scroll past, a person in your building. Something went up, or something got said, and you did not fight about it. You just quietly stopped crossing. And somewhere in the last few months the distance stopped feeling like awkwardness and started feeling like a principle.

As much as lieth in you

Paul writes one sentence about this and he puts two hedges around it, and both of them are mercy.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18

If it be possible. He says it right out loud. Sometimes it is not, and Paul knew it, and he did not make that your fault before you even started.

As much as lieth in you. There is your property line, surveyed by an apostle. Your half. Not his half, not the outcome, not whether he ever crosses back over.

You are not being asked to produce peace, you are being asked to keep your own half of it unlatched. Romans 12:18 fences the whole obligation at as much as lieth in you, and Galatians 5:22 lists peace as fruit of the Spirit rather than a thing a man manufactures by trying, so what grows in that yard is the Holy Spirit's work and never was a load you were carrying alone.

Now look hard at what the verse does not say, because this is where a person gets robbed.

It does not say agree with all men. It does not say soften it, revisit it, split the difference, or decide the thing you believe is smaller than you thought it was. Peaceably is a posture. It is not a position, and Paul never asked you to trade one for the other.

You have not given up an ounce of what you hold by leaving a door unlocked. Romans 14:5 says let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind, which is the opposite of a command to go soft, and the Spirit of truth in you is not the author of your convictions weakening. Hold it at full weight. Then leave the latch off.

What you actually bought at the farm store

You did not buy a ladder that October.

You bought thirty feet.

And here is what makes this one hard, harder than an argument would have been. Nobody ever fought. There was no blow up to point at, no line anybody crossed, nothing to forgive. The whole thing happened in the space where two men used to talk about gutters, and it happened one small avoidance at a time until the avoiding had a shape and the shape had a name.

Somewhere in there it stopped feeling like being uncomfortable and started feeling like being right. That is the expensive turn, because being right does not feel like a loss. It feels like ground.

In 1612 a man named Thomas Helwys asked the King of England for liberty of conscience, and he did not ask it only for his own people. He asked it for the ones he was completely certain were wrong. A generation later Roger Williams was put out of Massachusetts in the middle of winter and built a colony where the people who disagreed with him could live unmolested.

Neither one of those men pretended the disagreement was small. That is the part everybody forgets. They believed what they believed with their whole weight, and they asked the door be left open anyway, for the other fellow.

You are free to hold what you hold at full strength, and you have never needed his agreement in order to do it. Scripture tells every man to be fully persuaded in his own mind, and it is the Holy Spirit who settles a thing in a person like that, so the settling in you does not need a second signature from across a fence.

And hear the other half, because it is for you and not about him.

You have not been failing at love since September. Romans 12:18 opens with if it be possible, and God wrote that clause in on purpose for people standing exactly where you are standing, and the Spirit who has been at work in your yard all winter has not been keeping a tally of the days you took the trash out late.