Nowhere Else The Work Is

Twenty past five in the morning and the barn doorway on Hollis Creek Road is a rectangle of gray going slowly to gold. Trent Kessler is standing in it with a thermos lid of coffee, waiting on the light, which is the one part of the day that is his.

Behind him the parlor lights are already on and the compressor is running. His father is in there. Wendell Kessler has been up since four ten because Wendell has been up since four ten for fifty one years, and there is a list on the whiteboard by the door in Wendell's handwriting, which is how the two of them talk now.

They have worked eleven feet apart, six days a week, for twenty seven years.

The last kind thing Wendell said to his son was in the fall of 1998. Trent was fourteen. He had left the lot gate unlatched on a Saturday and thirty two head walked out onto the county road at dusk, and a heifer got hit by a hay truck, and a man named Sherrill Pate spent four hours in the dark on the road with a flashlight helping them get the rest back in. Trent has replayed that latch in his hand ten thousand times. Nobody said anything cruel to him that night. That was the strange part. What happened was that his father got quiet, and the quiet never lifted.

Since then there have been instructions. There have been observations about weather and about the price of corn. There has been, once, at a funeral, a hand on the back of the neck for about a second and a half.

There has not been one kind word.

Trent is forty one. He is good at this. He can pull a calf, keep a twenty year old skid steer running on parts that no longer exist, and read a cow's udder the way some men read a newspaper. He is also two hundred miles from any town where any of that means money, the herd is the herd, the ground has been in the family since 1911, and his own boy is nine years old and sleeping right now in the house his father was born in.

There is nowhere else the work is. That is not self pity. It is arithmetic.

So he stands in the doorway with the thermos lid and watches the line of gold come up off the treeline and across the frost on the gravel, and he lets it get all the way to his boots before he turns around. That is the whole ceremony. Nobody knows he does it. He has been doing it since he was maybe nineteen.

Then he goes in, and the compressor is running, and the whiteboard says WEST TANK and REPLACE INFLATIONS and nothing else, and Wendell does not look up.

Through it, and not around it

There is a psalm everybody can say by heart, and the middle of it is not what people remember about it.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.Psalm 23:4

Look at the preposition, because David chose it and God kept it. Through. Not out of, not around, not instead of. The shepherd does not route the sheep around the low ground. There are valleys in that country that are the only way to the next pasture, and a shepherd who avoided them would starve the flock to keep the walk pleasant.

And then look at what happens to the grammar right at the darkest point. The first three verses talk about Him. He maketh me. He leadeth me. He restoreth. Then the valley comes and the psalm turns and starts talking to Him. Thou art with me. Nearness shows up in the sentence exactly where the dark does.

You are walking through, and through is a word with a far side to it. I am not saying that to make a hard place sound nicer than it is. Psalm 23:4 is written that way on purpose, and the written word does not offer the sheep a detour anywhere in the psalm. And the Holy Spirit is not somewhere up ahead waiting for you to arrive. He is the with in that verse, at twenty past five, in a doorway.

Something else about that valley. Nothing in it puts out the light. The psalm never says the shadow won a thing. The shadow is real, it is named, and the man walking is comforted right inside it.

You have not been dimmed by that parlor, and eleven feet of quiet never had the power to do it. Psalm 23:4 says thou art with me and it does not add a condition about the temperature of the room. What the Spirit adds, this morning, is that the with is present tense and it is not a memory of a warmer year.

A cold room is not the lamp's doing

Now, the thing a man in that doorway most often does to himself.

He decides the cold is about him. He was fourteen and a latch was in his hand, and the quiet came down afterward, so the two got welded together and he has carried the weld ever since. Twenty seven years is a long time to be the reason for the weather in a building.

You were not the reason. A man went quiet in 1998, and men go quiet for a hundred reasons that live entirely inside them: grief they never named, a father of their own who did the same thing, a fear that got into them the night a heifer was hit and never left. Your father is a man God loves, and I have nothing but good to speak over him. But the cold in that parlor is his to carry and it was never yours to have caused.

And I will say this plainly and then move on, because it needs saying and it does not need drama. If what is happening in that house has stopped being coldness and started being danger, please tell somebody today who can actually help you. Staying is not the holy option when you are not safe, and leaving would not put you out.

You were lit by Christ, and a cold room has no mechanism for undoing that. John 8:12 has Jesus saying He is the light of the world and saying that whoever follows Him has the light of life, and the written word does not attach a location to it or a weather condition. The Spirit does not dim in low temperatures. He is the same in the parlor at five twenty as He is on a hillside in June.

This is yours in that doorway, in the gold on the frost, in the ceremony nobody knows about. Psalm 23:4 gave you the with and John 8:12 gave you the light, both in writing, both settled long before you were nineteen and doing it for the first time. And the Spirit is not asking you to feel it before it counts.