The notebook has been in his coat pocket since the second week of January and there is nothing in it.
That is not like him. There have been thirty one of these notebooks, one a year, and the old ones are in a drawer in the office with the rubber bands still round them, and if you asked him what he did in the spring of 2009 he could go and find out in about four minutes.
They are not diaries. They are plans. What goes in which field, when, what was got out of it, what it cost, what he would do different. He has written in one of them in a hospital car park and in one of them at his father's funeral, on the back page, because a thought came and thoughts have to be caught.
This one is empty.
He stands at the gate of the top field most evenings, which he has done all his life, and he takes it out, and he looks at the field, and then he puts it back.
Last year was bad. He is not going to make a speech about it. It was bad in the way that a year can be bad without anything dramatic happening: a run of small wrong things, a price that went the wrong way at the wrong week, one animal, one machine, and a wet spring on top of it.
He is not ruined and he wants that clear. The place will go on. He is fifty nine and he has seen worse in the eighties.
What is different is that he has no plan for the top field, and no plan for the one below it, and when he stands at the gate and looks, nothing comes. Not despair. An absence. He looks at ground he has known since he was six and there is nothing arriving where the plan usually is, and he has now been standing at that gate for eleven weeks with a pen in his coat.
And on Tuesday he said something out loud to the dog, which is who he says things to.
He said: I have got nothing.
You know the empty page. Yours may be a diary or a spreadsheet or a conversation you keep meaning to have. But you know what it is to stand where the plan usually comes from and find it not coming, and to keep standing there anyway because standing there is what you do.
Order came down, not up
Let me name the pit first, and it is not the year.
The pit is that a man who has produced the shape of his own place for forty years has stopped being able to, and has read that as the beginning of the end of himself. Not of the farm. Of him. Because when a man's job has been to look at ground and see what it will be, and he looks and sees nothing, the fear that arrives is not about the field.
Here is the second sentence in the Bible, and I want it read slow.
The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.Genesis 1:2
Formless. Void. Dark. No shape in it anywhere, and nothing in it capable of producing one.
That is not a description of failure. That is the ground state of everything before God spoke, and Scripture reports it without embarrassment, the way you would report weather.
And over it, before one thing had an edge, the Spirit of God, and the word for what He was doing is a brooding word. Deuteronomy 32:11 uses the same picture for an eagle spreading herself over her nest and her young. A bird over a nest.
Now I teach you one thing about the Hebrew and I draw the line in the same breath, because on this ground the two do not travel apart. The word there for Spirit is ruach, which also means breath and wind, and it is a feminine word in Hebrew grammar, so the verb beside it takes a feminine form, exactly the way it would beside the word for a hand or a gate or a city. That is grammar. Grammar is not sex. God is neither male nor female; Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and Scripture reaches for a father's traits and a mother's both when it tells you who He is, and the bird over the nest is one of the motherly ones and He chose it Himself. It does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess. It makes the picture true.
Take that at the gate, and know it is not my sympathy, it is the second sentence of the Bible. You are being brooded over while the page is empty. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit over a deep that had nothing to offer, and it is the Holy Spirit who is over that field and over the man standing at the gate of it.
And then read on one verse, because this is the whole answer to a man with a pen.
And God said, Let there be light.Genesis 1:3
The order came down. It came by a word, from above the water. It did not come up out of the deep, and the deep was not asked to produce it, and nowhere in that chapter is the water thanked for its contribution or blamed for its silence.
The plan was never the thing that held this place together. I am not putting down thirty one notebooks; every one of them was honest work and they fed a family. But the shape came down the whole time, and a man with a full notebook and a man with an empty one are standing in exactly the same relation to the God who speaks it.
You have been standing at that gate waiting to produce something, and the producing was never your part.
You are standing over ground with no plan on it, and you were never the one who had to make it fruitful. Genesis 1:2 puts the Spirit of God over a deep with nothing written on it yet, and it is the Holy Spirit who moves first, which is why an empty notebook after a bad year is not a verdict on a man.
That is the whole of it, and I want to say the harder half of it too, because you are not a man to be comforted with only the easy half.
I do not know what He will speak over the top field or when. It may be a plan in that notebook by March and it may be nothing for a year. I am not going to stand here and tell you the answer is coming by spring, because I do not know that, and a man who has farmed for forty years can smell a promise that nobody was authorized to make.
What I know is the order of operations on the first page of the Bible, and it never varies. Brooding, then word, then shape. The deep's whole job during all of that was to be there.
You are not being asked to make anything hold, and the empty page is not evidence about you. That is Genesis 1:2 and 1:3 in the order they are written, and it is the Holy Spirit who broods over ground before there is a plan for it, which is a thing He was doing before there was a man to write one.
So keep standing at the gate. That part is right and it always has been. Only stand there with the notebook shut.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud at the gate, hands on the bar. You are in Christ, and the authority to speak over ground you have no plan for is delegated to you in Him; it does not depend on what you can see in the field, which is nothing. These stand on what is written in the first chapter of the Bible and are carried by the Holy Spirit, not by your judgement. What He speaks over that field, and when, is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own timing.
- Empty page in this notebook, you are not a verdict on me, and I say so in the name of Jesus. Genesis 1:2 says the Spirit was over a deep that had nothing in it, and the same Spirit is over this ground while I have got nothing to write.
- Fear that came up at the gate on Tuesday, that a man who cannot see what a field will be is finished, you were never in the record. It is written that the shape came by a word from above the water, and His Spirit is the one brooding, which He did before there was a man on the earth to plan anything.
- Lord, You are over this field the way You were over the first deep, and I am not making anything hold tonight. I stand at the gate with my hands open and name the thing I have no plan for, and I thank You that You are neither male nor female and that the whole of both is over this place while I stand here with nothing.
Genesis 1:2
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