Six Texts in a Year

He sits on the second porch step at about twenty to seven, most evenings, with the phone face up on his knee and the screen dark.

Six texts last year. He knows the number because he knows the number, not because he keeps a list, and if you pressed him he could tell you all six. One at Easter. One on her own birthday, thanking him for the card, four words long. One in the middle of August with no occasion attached to it at all, which he thinks about more than the other five put together. One at Thanksgiving. One when their old dog died, which she found out about from her cousin. And one in March that said a song came on the radio and it made her think of him driving.

That is the year. Six.

He sends one on the first of every month. That is his rule and he made it himself after the first eighteen months, when he was sending three and four a week and could feel himself doing it. Three lines. No questions in it, because a question is a bill and she has had enough bills from him. Saw a red tail on the fence post by the gate this morning. Thought about you. Love you, Dad. Then he puts the phone down and goes and does something with his hands, because the first hour after is the worst hour.

Five years of first days of months. Sixty of them. Thirty-one answered, which sounds like more than it feels like, because eleven of those thirty-one were a thumbs up.

He does not know all of what happened. He knows the years he worked out of state cost something he cannot put a number to, and he knows there is a version of the story he has never been told, and he has stopped assembling the case, because assembling the case does nothing except keep a man up.

Here is what he will not say to anybody at church, because of how it would sound. If this is restoration, it is the slowest thing he has ever been part of. Barns go up faster. Trees bear faster. He has watched grass come back on burned ground faster than this.

And this year there were six again. Same number. But in June one of them had a question in it. She asked him whether his knee had gotten better. That is all. Eight words and a question mark, and he sat on that step and read it about forty times, and he has not told one living soul about it because he cannot stand the thought of somebody saying that is wonderful, that means she is coming around.

You have your own step and your own count. It may be a daughter, or a son, or a brother, or a friend of thirty years who answers about once a season. You know the number. You know which ones were real and which ones were a thumbs up. And you have felt the particular shame of measuring something this small and caring this much. You are in something real, and the speed of it is not evidence against it. James 5:7 puts a farmer in the middle of a long wait in the written word and never once calls him idle, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been on that porch step at twenty to seven with you, every evening, for five years, keeping better track than you are.

The farmer waits and he is not idle

Here is the verse, and it is about farming on purpose.

Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.James 5:7

Long patience. That is the phrase, and it is one word in the original and it is not a soft word. It is the patience of a man who has already done everything he knows how to do and has to now stand still, which is the hardest work there is for a person who fixes things.

But do not read waiting as sitting. Nobody who has farmed reads it that way. That farmer is not on a chair. He is up before light every day of that wait, fixing what breaks, walking his ground, watching the sky, keeping the equipment right, doing the twenty things a season requires. He is working the entire time. There is exactly one thing he is not doing, and it is the only thing he actually wants: he is not making it grow faster. He cannot. It is not available to him, and he has known that since he was a boy.

You have a verse that puts a farmer in the middle of the waiting and never once calls him idle. It is written that way in James 5:7, that he waits and has long patience and receives the rain rather than scheduling it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person working faithfully at the part that is theirs without reaching over into the part that is not.

And read what the farmer waits on. The early and the latter rain. Rain is the one item on that whole farm that no amount of a man's effort produces. James picked the example carefully. The thing the harvest depends on most is the thing the farmer has the least say over, and he plants anyway, every year of his life, knowing it.

Slow is not the same word as stalled

Now the part that this category exists for, and I am going to be careful with it because careless hands do damage here.

Slow is not stalled. Those are two different words and your chest cannot tell them apart, which is why you need something outside your chest to tell you. When a thing moves at the speed of six texts a year, every instinct you own reads it as nothing happening. That instinct is not weak faith. It is a bad instrument. A man cannot see an orchard grow by standing in it, and standing in it longer does not help.

And here is the other half, and it is the honest half. Restored is not the same word as replaced. What is coming back at six texts a year is not the girl who used to ride in the truck with her feet on the dash. That relationship is not being reissued to him. Whatever comes of this, it will be a thing between two adults who have both been through something, and it will not look like 2004, and nobody should tell him it will.

You are being restored at this speed, and slow is not the same word as stalled. His word says the farmer receives the rain rather than arranging it, and that puts the timing in hands other than yours by design, and it is the Holy Spirit who does actual work in a person during a season when there is nothing on the surface to point at.

I want to say plainly what I am not saying. I am not telling you this is about to move. I am not telling you what she is going to do, or when, or that a question mark in June means anything at all about what comes next. I do not know and neither does anybody who has told you they do. It is already finished as His work, and not one hour of it runs on your schedule. He promised in James 5:7 that the rain comes to the one who waits for it and never said the farmer sets the date, and it is the same Spirit who has kept a man sending three lines on the first of the month for sixty months without once turning them into a demand.