The Second Post Hole

The digger is standing up on its own, handles leaning against the top wire, and he is sitting on the ground about four feet from it with his back against the last good post.

Nine to go. He counted them this morning from the truck, walking the north line with his coffee, and nine did not sound like anything. He has replaced nine posts in an afternoon more times than he could tell you. September, rain due Thursday, the Hendricks calves coming into that field on Saturday, and a fence with a rotted stretch is not a thing you leave through a rain.

The first hole went in fine. Twenty minutes, maybe less. Good dirt for once, no rock.

At the second hole, about a foot and a half down, his arms quit.

Not a pain. Not a snap. Nothing you could point a doctor at. They simply stopped taking instruction, the way a starter motor turns over and turns over and does not catch, and he stood there with the handles spread and his breath going strange and he thought, plainly, without any drama at all: I cannot do this.

He is sixty-one. He has been running fence on this ground since he was fourteen. He knows every rise on it, he knows which corner floods, he knows the post he set the year his father died because he set it crooked and never fixed it. And he is sitting in the grass at two in the afternoon with a job in front of him he has done a thousand times and a body that will not take it, and the weather is coming.

The thought that arrived with the arms is the one that actually hurts.

Not I am tired. Not I need a minute. The thought was: this is what I am now. As if the second post hole handed down a ruling about the whole man. As if forty years of that fence line had been a loan and the note just came due, and the rain on Thursday is going to prove something about him that he already suspects.

He has that verse somewhere. Everybody does. It was on a poster in a locker room and on the back of a T-shirt at a race and stitched on a pillow in his sister's front room. I can do all things. He knows it, and sitting in the grass it feels like a sentence written by somebody who never held a digger, and he is a little ashamed of thinking so.

You know that ground. Maybe it is not a fence. Maybe it is a flight of stairs, or a basket of washing at the bottom of them, or a shift you have worked for twenty years and cannot see the end of today. Whatever yours is, the body quit before the job did, and the quiet ruling came down with it.

Let me take you to where that verse was actually written, because it was not written on a poster.

The verse was written by a man who had been brought low

I can do all things through him who strengthens me.Philippians 4:13

Paul wrote that in a cell, writing back to a church that had sent him help. Read the four verses in front of it and the whole shape changes. He says he has learned to be brought low and he has learned to abound. He says he knows what it is to be hungry and what it is to have plenty. He is not describing a man with a full tank. He is describing a man who has been all the way down and found something underneath him that was not his own supply.

And the verb matters more than the noun. The word behind strengthens is endynamounti, and it is a present participle. Not strengthened me once, back at conversion, a reserve he draws down. It is the one who is pouring power into me, right now, continuously, while the sentence is being written. The strength is not stored in Paul. It arrives in Paul.

That is the difference between the poster and the letter. The poster says: you have it in you. The letter says: it is being handed to you, in the hour you are in, by a Person.

You are supplied by Christ Himself in the exact hour you ran out. That is not my encouragement to you, and I have none to offer. It is what Philippians 4:13 says in the tense it says it in, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a present participle and makes it an actual current in a pair of arms that quit at two in the afternoon. Your tank was never the source. It was only ever the container.

And notice what Paul does not do. He does not congratulate himself on being brought low. He does not recommend it. There is not one line in that letter that treats his hunger as a technique or his prison as a workout. He names the low place plainly, the way you would name weather, and then he names who supplies him inside it.

You have a supply that has nothing to do with what your arms had at the first hole. His word calls Him the One who strengthens, present tense and ongoing, and His Spirit is the One who carries that from a prison letter into a field in September. What ran out was yours. What is arriving is not.

What all things meant, and what it did not

Here is where the poster does its real damage, and I want to take it off the wall gently.

Read the Greek plainly and all things is closer to these things. The things in front of him. Being low, being full, being hungry, being fed, being in that cell on that day. Paul is not claiming universal capacity. He is claiming sufficient supply for the assignment actually in his hands. It is not a promise that you can do anything you can imagine. It is better than that, because it is specific: for the thing set in front of you, there is enough, and it comes from Him.

Which means the verse was never asking you to look at nine post holes.

Look at one. You are given what the next hole requires, and not one shovelful more, because the next hole is the assignment and the rest of the line is not yours yet. Philippians 4:13 is a supply line, not a warehouse, and the Holy Spirit meters it into the hour a man is standing in, not into the week he is dreading. Manna did not stack. Neither does this.

So let me say what I am not saying, because on this ground it matters. I am not telling you your arms will come back at three o'clock. I do not know that, and a man who tells you he does is selling you a poster. I am not telling you the nine posts get done before Thursday. What I am telling you is what the text says about supply, and the text says the supply is His, it is present tense, and it is sized to the thing in front of you.

You were never the source of what got that fence built for forty years. It is written that Christ is the One strengthening, and the Spirit was doing that quietly through every good summer when you thought the strength was simply yours because it kept showing up. It always came from somewhere. You only noticed the pipe when the pressure dropped.