To the Gate and Back

The gate is two hundred and twenty yards from his front door. He knows because he counted it in the spring, and he has wished ever since that he had not, because a number is a thing you can be measured against.

It is the good hour, half past seven, when the light comes straight down the lane between the hedges and turns the ruts gold and makes even the nettles look like something. He has the pole with him. He bought it at a garden center rather than at the chemist, on purpose, so that it could be a walking pole and not a stick, and he is aware of how much thought went into that.

He walks down. It takes a while. There is nothing dramatic about the walking, no lurching, nothing anybody driving past would notice. His legs simply stop being interested at a certain point, the way a phone stops being interested at four percent, and no argument has ever changed their mind.

At the gate he does what he does. Both hands on the top bar. Weight forward on his forearms. And he looks at the rest of it.

Because the rest of it is still there. Over the stile at the corner, along the headland of the top field, down through the wood where it goes cold and smells of leaf mold even in August, over the little bridge, along the beck, and back up the far side of the hill into the lane again. Four miles. He did it four or five times a week for nineteen years. He did it in weather that kept sensible people in.

He can see the stile from here, ninety yards past the gate.

Then he turns round.

That is the part. Not the legs, not the pole, not the counting. The turning round. Every evening at the same bar of the same gate, with the light still going on down the lane without him, he takes his hands off the top rail and he turns his body back toward the house, and something in his chest goes down like a shutter.

He has never said any of this out loud. Who would he say it to? Everybody has been very kind. Everybody says it is wonderful that he is out at all, and they mean it, and it lands on him like a hand on a bruise, because what they are pleased about is exactly the thing he is standing at a gate mourning.

And underneath, in the place where a man keeps the sentences he has not agreed to, there is one that has been getting louder since about April. That was the last of it. That is what you are now, and this is the size you come in.

The light goes over the top of the hedge and the lane goes dim from the bottom up. He is halfway home.

You know that gate. It may not be a lane and it may not be four miles, but you know what it is to stand at the edge of what you used to be able to do, and to turn round, and to have nobody to say the turning round to because everyone is so pleased you got out of the house. I am not going to tell you the four miles come back, because I do not know that, and anybody who says they know is not telling you the truth. And I am not going to ask you to make your peace with anything. I want to show you one verse, because of where it puts the sunrise.

The sunrise and the limp are in the same sentence

There is a night in Genesis that people tell as a wrestling story, and then they stop telling it one verse too early.

A man is alone at a river crossing. Someone comes at him in the dark and they wrestle until daybreak, and when it is clear He cannot prevail, He touches the socket of the hip and puts it out. The man will not let go, asks for the blessing, and is given a new name. And then this.

The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.Genesis 32:31

Read what is in that sentence, because both things are in it. The sun rose upon him. And he limped. Not one after the other, not one instead of the other, not one as the price of the other. Both, in one line, in one man, walking out of one night.

And the text never fixes it. There is no verse further on where the hip comes right. He limps for the rest of a very long life. The Bible, which is perfectly capable of telling you when somebody is healed, does not tell you that about this, and it does not treat the silence as a loose end.

You are a person who came out of something carrying something, and the written word does not read that as a defeat. I am not putting a brave face on your legs. Genesis 32:31 sets the sunrise and the limp in one sentence and declines to rank them, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a man at a river and lays it against a man with his forearms on a five bar gate.

Notice also what the sun does. It rises upon him. The light is not waiting at the far end of the field for the version of him that can get there. It comes down onto the man where he actually is, at the pace he is actually going, on the hip he actually has.

You have a sunrise and a limp in the same sentence, and Scripture never asks you to choose which one is the true one. That is what is written, in that order, in that verse, and it is His Spirit who makes an ancient line about Penuel a present fact in a lane at half past seven.

What I am not going to say to you

Two things, plainly, because both of them get said to people in your position constantly and both of them are somebody else's verdict on your life.

I am not going to tell you the four miles come back. I do not know. Nobody reading a page knows that about a body they have never met, and a man who hands you a promise he cannot keep has not comforted you, he has borrowed against your hope. Whether any of it returns is His to decide.

And I am not going to tell you to accept it. That is not mine to hand out either. Nobody gets to schedule the end of your grief over a thing you have genuinely lost, and the fact that you are standing at that gate every evening wanting the top field is not a spiritual problem that needs correcting. You are allowed to want the four miles back, and the wanting is not a fault in you. Scripture has a whole book of a man saying exactly what he had lost, out loud, at length, without one word of rebuke from God about it, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a person who mourns.

What I will say is what the verse does, which is a smaller thing and a truer one. It puts the light on the man on his way home.

You were not sent to this gate as a sentence, and there is no line in the written word that reads a short walk as a verdict on the one walking it. That is the plainest thing Genesis 32:31 does, and the Holy Spirit is the One who says it into a chest at the exact moment the shutter comes down.

The turning round is not the failure. It is the point on the lane where the light happens to reach you, and the light is on you at that bar of that gate in the same way it was on Jacob outside Penuel, on a hip that never did come right.