I Build It Big Enough Anyway

Twelve come. He builds it for nineteen. He has done it every time for five years.

It is not subtle if you know what you are looking at, and one person in that family does. His cousin came and stood beside him this summer while it was catching and said, without any edge in it at all: you know you could build a smaller one.

He said something about the wind.

Twelve come. Seven do not, and have not since the year everything came apart over the land and the house and the two things that got said. The seven are not coming, and everybody has stopped expecting them, and the gatherings are good now in the way things become good again after a few years.

And still, every time, he stacks it for nineteen. It takes about forty minutes longer and it burns down slower and there is always a rim of unused space around the outside of it.

And here is what he has never said out loud to a living soul: he does not know whether he is keeping a place or whether he is leaving a reproach out there in the dark for seven people who are not even present to be reproached by it.

Say the true thing about the fire

Let me name it before anybody categorizes it, and let me take the second possibility seriously rather than waving it away, because you raised it and it deserves an answer.

Could a fire be a reproach? It could. There are people who would build that fire in exactly that way to make a point, and everybody at that gathering would know it, and it would be a very effective and very cold thing to do.

So run the test. Who has been told? Nobody. Who has been sent a photograph? Nobody. Has it been mentioned to any of the seven, by you or by anybody at your asking, in five years? It has not.

A reproach requires a recipient. This one has never had one.

You are keeping rather than reproaching, and five years of nobody knowing is what proves it. That is not somebody being kind about a fire. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unjust to forget your work and the love you have shown, which covers forty extra minutes of stacking, and the Holy Spirit is the one raising it now to answer your own question rather than to hand you a new one.

And Isaiah says something about space that is worth taking at face value.

Enlarge the place of thy tent, and let them stretch forth the curtains of thine habitations: spare not, lengthen thy cords, and strengthen thy stakes.Isaiah 54:2

Read what is being said and to whom. That is spoken over somebody with nothing, and the instruction is to make the tent bigger before there is anybody to fill it.

Spare not. Lengthen the cords. Strengthen the stakes. All of it in advance, all of it on no evidence, and God is the one saying it.

Building it big is not, in that chapter, a symptom of anything. It is what He tells somebody to do.

Keeping space is not the same as keeping score

There is a way of doing this that keeps score. It knows the number. It says the number out loud occasionally, in a way that sounds like arithmetic and is not.

That is not what is happening on that shore. You have never said seven to anybody. You said something about the wind to a cousin standing beside you, which was a way of protecting something rather than a way of hiding a grudge.

You are holding space rather than holding an account, and the difference is that nothing on that shore has hardened in five years. Scripture puts the posture in 1 Corinthians 13:5, where charity thinks no evil, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a long practice from turning into a ledger.

Where your part ends

Say this plainly. Keeping a place is never the same as owing anybody access, and nothing here asks anybody to hold a space open into harm. If there is a reason those seven should not be at that fire, then build it for nineteen and let the door stay shut, and there is no contradiction in it. Get whoever is at risk safe, tell one real person who can actually do something, and hold this: safety comes before peace, every single time.

And this too, plainly. Nothing here says they are coming. Nobody knows that, and any article that promised it would be lying to a man who has laid that fire about twenty times.

He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young.Isaiah 40:11

He gathers. That is His verb and it appears in the same book, four chapters before the one about the tent. You are enlarging a space while somebody else does the gathering, and those are two different jobs and only one of them was ever yours. Isaiah 40:11 puts the gathering in the Shepherd's arm rather than in the size of a fire, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work in seven people who are nowhere near that shoreline.