The Hill She Has Always Walked

The lane runs up from the cattle gate to the mailbox at the blacktop. Four hundred yards, and steep in the middle where the bank washes out every spring.

Nell has walked it since she was six. She walked it in school shoes with a lunch pail knocking her knee. She walked it in the dark at fourteen, the winter her father was sick, because somebody had to be standing at the top when the doctor's headlights came over the ridge. She walked it twice a day for eleven years carrying milk. She walked it the January the ice took the hickory down across the middle of it, and she went around the hickory, and a week later she went over the sawn end of it. She knows where the gravel goes loose. She knows the one place to put her left foot when the bank is wet. She has never in her life thought about that hill, the way a person does not think about their own hallway.

This morning she is standing at the cattle gate with her hand on the chain, and she cannot go up it.

Not will not. Cannot. She has been standing there long enough that the sun has come off the top of the ridge and down into the lane, and the light is on the gravel now, working its way toward her, and she has not moved.

Nothing dramatic happened. That is the part she could not explain to anybody. There was no fall, no envelope from the clinic with a word in it. There has been a year, and each month a little less, and this morning she came out with the mail in her hand and put her hand on the chain the way she has forty thousand times and her legs said no. Not pain, exactly. Just no. Like reaching for a light switch in a room where the power is off.

She looks up the lane. It is the same lane. The rise is the same rise. The mailbox is up there, white, with the flag down.

Then she starts doing the thing she has been doing all year, which is arithmetic. Four hundred yards. Twenty minutes if she takes it in pieces and rests at the culvert. Nobody comes to the house until Thursday. The truck is at the top, because she left it at the top on Sunday like a fool.

And underneath the arithmetic, quieter, in words she would not say out loud to a living soul, is the other thing. The verdict. It has been forming since about March, and this morning it finishes itself for the first time.

I am not who I was, and nothing is coming back.

The chain is cold in her hand. A jay is going off in the cedars behind her. The light keeps coming down the gravel toward her boots, and she stands at the bottom of a hill she has walked her whole life.

Where that verse was standing when it was written

The line about hinds' feet gets printed on things. Coffee mugs, a card at the register, the back of a bulletin. It reads like a rallying cry, and read that way it is one more voice at the bottom of the lane telling a woman what she ought to be able to do.

So go and look at where the man was standing when he wrote it.

Habakkuk is at the end of his book and everything is gone. He lists it out, plainly, the way a farmer lists it. The fig tree is not blossoming. There is no fruit on the vines. The olive crop has failed, the fields are making nothing, the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls. That is a whole life's work, itemized, and none of it is there. That is the ground the sentence is spoken from. Not from a good year. From an empty barn in a bad one.

The LORD God is my strength, and he will make my feet like hinds' feet, and he will make me to walk upon mine high places.Habakkuk 3:19

Read the first clause again slowly, because everything is in it. The LORD God is my strength. Not gives me strength, the way a man hands over a tool and stands back to watch. Is my strength. The strength in the sentence is God's own, and the possession word is doing the work: it is His, and it is being called mine, and both of those are true at once.

You are not being asked to produce one thing on that gravel. That is not a soft reading of Habakkuk 3:19, it is the grammar of it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line off a coffee mug and puts it under a person's boots at the bottom of a lane. The barn was empty when the sentence was written. It has never once required a full barn to be true.

And notice what the verse does not say. It does not say the fig tree came back. Habakkuk never gets his herd. What he gets is feet.

Hinds' feet are not about being fast

A hind is a deer, and the thing people get wrong about deer is thinking the point is speed.

Go and watch one on a slope sometime. What is remarkable is not how fast she goes. It is that she is standing, easy and unhurried, on a piece of ground that has no business holding anybody up. Loose rock, a forty degree bank, wet leaf. She puts a foot down where a person would go over, and she stands there, and she is not bracing. She is just standing on it.

That is what the word carries. Not speed. Sure-footedness on ground that ought not to hold. And the verb after it is walk, not run. He will make me to walk upon mine high places.

You have a footing on this slope that does not come out of your own legs. The written word says He makes the feet, He does not merely inspect them, and the same Spirit who breathed that line through a man with an empty barn is the One standing in the lane this morning. The legs are what gave out. The footing is a separate thing entirely, and it has a different source.

And mine high places is not a mountain in another country. In the Hebrew it is the high ground of a person's own territory, the ridge behind their own house. Habakkuk is not being promised an adventure. He is being given the ordinary steep places of the life he already has. Nell's high place is four hundred yards of gravel with a white mailbox at the top of it.

You were given a strength that is God's own and was never a stouter version of your own. Nothing here is asking anybody to find a reserve tank, because Habakkuk 3:19 does not describe a reserve tank, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a tired woman a heavier load and call it grace. The strength in that written line has always belonged to Him. It is being spoken over her, this morning, in her own name.