The Handshake Nobody Wrote Down

Nineteen years, and never one cross word about any of it.

They shook on it at a gate in the spring of a year he could name without thinking, and that was the whole of the arrangement. Grazing, and a bit of water, and the use of a lane, and a thing they did with the winter feed that suited them both and would take twenty minutes to explain to anybody else.

The man would have cut his own arm off before he went back on it. That is not sentiment, that is a fact about him that anybody in that valley would confirm.

Every winter, for nineteen winters, one of them would say they ought to get it written up properly.

They never did. It was always the sort of thing you do when there is a quiet week.

He went in November. It was quick and it was not cruel and there was a good turnout.

And about ten days afterwards, standing at that same gate with the frost on the top rail, this man understood something that has not left him since.

The whole arrangement was living in that man's head.

There is no paper. There is nothing in a drawer. There is no letter, no email, nothing said in front of a third person that anybody could be asked to remember. Nineteen years of an arrangement that ran perfectly, and it existed in exactly one place, and that place has been buried.

His son is decent. That has to be said, because it is true and because it matters. The son is not the problem, and there is no villain in this and there is not going to be one. The son simply does not know, and there is no earthly reason why he should.

Here is what he has not said out loud to anybody, including his wife.

He does not know what he is standing on any more. And he has caught himself, twice now, wondering whether nineteen years of doing a thing properly counts for anything at all if there is no longer anybody alive who knows it happened.

If your whole arrangement was living in one man's memory, come and sit up on the gate. There is tea in that flask and nobody out here wants anything from you.

The psalm that says the thing out loud

There is a psalm that says a hard thing about people in one breath and then puts something under you in the next, and both halves belong to you this evening.

Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish. Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help.Psalm 146:3-5

Read the middle sentence, because it is the one nobody quotes and it is the one that has been lived inside since November.

In that very day his thoughts perish.

Not his character. Not his decency. His thoughts. The things a man was holding in his head, the arrangements, the understandings, the twenty minutes of winter feed detail that only he could have explained. All of it goes with him on the day, and Scripture says so plainly and does not soften it.

Then the very next line puts a floor in.

You are being handed a help that does not perish on the day a good man's breath goes out. Psalm 146:4 says a man's thoughts perish and Psalm 146:5 calls happy the one whose help is the God of Jacob, and it is the Holy Spirit who set those two sentences back to back rather than leaving the first one standing on its own, which means the thing you found out at that gate in the frost is in the book already and it has an answer under it.

What did and did not go into the ground

Now let us be exact about what was lost, because the mourning has been for more than actually went.

What went is the arrangement. The detail, the understanding, the shared memory of what was agreed at a gate. That is real and it is gone and nothing here is going to pretend otherwise.

What did not go is the nineteen years.

Every one of those years happened. Every honest dealing in them happened. Nothing about a man dying reaches backwards and unmakes what was done while he was alive, and no amount of missing paperwork can convert nineteen years of straight dealing into nineteen years of nothing.

You have nineteen years that are recorded somewhere that does not depend on any man's memory. Malachi 3:16 says a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord and thought upon his name, and it is written of a record God keeps rather than one a family keeps, and it is the same Spirit who moves a thing to be remembered, so the years at that gate are held in a place a churchyard cannot reach.

The question about whether it counted

Here is the question that has come at you twice now, and it deserves a straight answer rather than being walked away from.

Does a thing done properly count, if nobody alive knows it happened?

You were being watched the entire nineteen years by the only witness whose memory does not perish. Matthew 6:6 says thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly, and it is written of things done where no one can see rather than of things done in front of a room, and it is the Holy Spirit who searches the deep things, which means every honest winter at that gate had a witness in it who is still alive.

That is not a consolation. It is the actual state of affairs, and it was true before November and it is true now.