Walking The Fence Line Back

Delia found the first bad place about a quarter mile past the corner brace, and it was not the place.

Two strands sagging where a limb had come down on them at some point, but the wire was whole and the ground under it was not tracked up, so nothing had gone through there. She stood looking at it a good while anyway, the way you look at a thing you were hoping would settle a question.

Seven head had gotten out sometime Tuesday night. She had come out at first light on Wednesday to a lot with nobody in it and the feed still in the bunk from the day before, which is how she knew it had happened early, and she had stood in that empty lot with a cold cup in her hand and felt the whole thing arrive in her chest at once.

Emmett next door had a horse trailer and forty years of doing this and a phone that rang on the second ring. She did not call him.

Here is why she did not call him, and if this part sounds familiar you can stop reading it as a story about cattle.

She wanted to be able to tell him where. Not because he would ask, because Emmett would not ask, but because a wire down means a wire has been down a while, and a wire that has been down a while means she had not walked that line since April, and if you are going to be handed that fact in front of your neighbor you would at least like to be the one holding it first. She wanted to know how far it was on her before anybody else said it out loud.

So she walked the fence.

It is a little over three miles around that place. She started at the corner brace at nine in the morning in November with fencing pliers in her coat pocket and a roll of smooth wire she did not end up using, and she walked it. She found the limb. She found a stretch where the staples had backed out of six posts in a row, and she drove them all, standing in wet grass, because she was there. She found a low spot where the water gets under in a hard spring and a cow could have stepped through and probably had not. Four places wrong and not one of them the one.

The rain came in a little after three. Real November rain, the kind that goes straight to the skin and takes the light out of the afternoon early. By four she was on the back side of the section, a mile and a half from her truck, and she had stopped looking at the fence and was mostly just walking.

Then headlights came bouncing across the field toward her, and she did not know whether to be relieved or to sit down in the grass.

Emmett rolled his window down about four inches.

"Get in."

She got in. She started saying something about four places and staples and how she had not gotten all the way around yet, and he let her run out on her own.

Then he said, "They're in your lot. Since four."

She looked at him.

"How."

"Drove in your field, opened your gate, and hit the horn twice." He shrugged the shrug of a man who does not think he has done anything. "Same as you do every morning of their lives. They came at a run, Delia. Didn't even have to get out of the truck."

She sat there with the heater going and the wipers on and her boots full of water.

"I never found where they got out."

"No," he said. "You didn't."

And then he said the thing she has thought about every November since.

"They didn't come home because somebody found the hole. They came home because they know that horn. We'll walk it Saturday and we'll fix it in an hour, and it'll be a nothing job. But the cows are in, honey. They've been in since four o'clock."

He did not wait for you at the gap

Somewhere you picked up the idea that turning around requires a report.

That before you can come back you have to be able to name it. When it started. Which conversation. Which year it stopped being a slip and started being a direction. Which of the four bad places along that fence was the one that actually let it all out. And until you can produce that, you are not turning, you are researching, and you have been researching for a long time. The Holy Spirit has never once asked you for that report.

Nowhere does Scripture ask a returning person for the coordinates.

Look at how it actually reads. Come, and let us return, says Hosea, for He has torn and He will heal us. Turn to Me with all your heart, says Joel, and rend your heart and not your garments, for He is gracious and merciful and of great kindness. Both of those are addressed to people who had been gone a long time and could not have told you when it began, and neither prophet requests a timeline. They request a direction.

You are being drawn, right now, and that is not a feeling I am attributing to you. Jeremiah 31:3 says He loved with an everlasting love and therefore with lovingkindness He drew, and the Spirit who put that verb in the past tense is the one working on you tonight, so the pull you have been calling restlessness has a name and it is His hand.

That matters more than it sounds, because most of us are carrying a version of this where we work up the turn ourselves and then present it. Jesus said plainly that no one comes to Him unless the Father draws him. The initiative was never yours. It has been His since before you noticed anything was wrong, which is why you cannot find the beginning of it: you are not the one who started this conversation.

Now here is the anchor, and I want you to hear how it is worded.

I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for mine anger is turned away from him.Hosea 14:4

Count what He takes responsibility for. I will heal. I will love. Mine anger is turned. Three clauses and the subject of every one of them is God. The wandering is named honestly, because Scripture never pretends, and then it is put in the category of things He heals rather than things you explain.

You have a Father whose anger about this is already turned away, and that is not sentiment, it is Hosea 14:4 in the plainest words the prophet could find. He said it once, and His Spirit has never stopped saying it, which is why it is in front of you today of all days.

And notice the freely. Not on terms. Not once the audit is finished. There is no version of Hosea where the healing waits on the man producing an accurate account of his own wandering.

Then there is the son in Luke 15, and everybody knows this one, and almost nobody notices the timing. He had a speech ready. He had rehearsed it on the road, the whole thing, make me as one of your hired servants. He never got to finish it. His father saw him a long way off, ran, fell on his neck, and started calling for the robe while the boy was still working through his prepared remarks.

The father did not walk him back along the road asking where exactly he had turned off.

It is already settled, and it was settled from His side. What is written in Luke 15 is that the father ran, and the same Spirit who preserved that detail for two thousand years is the one keeping you from closing this page.