Five Stones and a Free Hand

The barrow handles come up as far as her hip and no further, and she stands there holding them with her arms going, and she is laughing at herself while she does it.

It is the work morning on the growing patch behind the flats, the one that happens on the last Saturday, and there are eleven of them out this time because the weather held. Somebody's boy is running the length of the path with a trowel nobody asked him to fetch. Two women are arguing pleasantly about where the raspberry canes went last year. There is a flask on the low wall and a leaning stack of blue plastic cups, and the whole place smells of cut grass and turned soil and somebody's coffee.

She is the one people ask. That is the thing to know about her. Where does this go, is this a weed, how deep, when do we cut them back, and she knows, every time, and she loves that she knows.

So when the young lad forked the last of the old bedding onto her barrow, one more, then one more, cheerful about it, she did not say stop. She never says stop. She got in between the handles and lifted, and the wheel came up an inch and settled back down into the same soft rut it had made, and the lad has already gone off to find something else to be useful with.

Nobody has noticed. Everybody is busy. She could stand on this path all morning.

That is the sentence that arrives while she is standing there, and it arrives from somewhere much older than the barrow. She could hold these handles until the light goes, and the load would not get one ounce lighter for being held.

You know that feeling in your arms.

And I want to say this before anything else, because you have probably had it said to you the other way round. You did not gather all of that out of vanity. Nobody does. You were frightened, and you are not the sort of person who sits still when you are frightened, so you went and found out. Then you found out more. Then you found the thing that flatly contradicted the first thing, and being honest, you had to go and settle that too. Printed pages in plastic wallets. Four notebooks. A folder of things torn out of other people's magazines in waiting rooms. Nine hundred saved posts on a phone, which you could not summarize now if your life depended on it, and which you keep anyway, in case.

That was not foolishness. That was love, running in the only direction it was allowed to run at one in the morning.

But beloved, look at your arms.

The armor was a gift, and it still did not fit

Here is the weight, said plainly, because I do not think anybody has ever said it back to you.

You are not tired from not knowing. You are tired from knowing. You carry the version where it is nothing, and the version where it is everything, and the six versions in between, and you carry all of them at once, all day, because to set one down would be to stop being careful, and careful is the last job you were certain you could still do well. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in 1 Samuel 17:39, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

And underneath that sits a piece of arithmetic nobody warned you about. The more you gathered, the less you could lift. A person with one thing in her hand can move. A person with forty stands on the path holding the handles.

There is a boy in the Scriptures who was handed the finest equipment in the country and could not walk in it.

And David girded his sword upon his armour, and he assayed to go; for he had not proved it. And David said unto Saul, I cannot go with these; for I have not proved them. And David put them off him.1 Samuel 17:39

Notice what nobody in that tent was doing wrong. Saul was not being unkind. He gave the boy his own armor, the king's own, the best in Israel, and he meant it as protection. The bronze was not faulty. The sword was not blunt. There is not one item in that tent you could throw out and feel good about it.

That is exactly what makes your load so hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Most of what is on it is true. It is not nonsense somebody could talk you out of in an afternoon. It is other people's proved armor, handed to you kindly by people who meant you well, and it has never once fitted your particular arms, your particular night, your particular life.

Proved is the whole word. It does not mean better or worse. It means walked in. Tested on this body, over this ground, until the body itself knows it. And a thing you have only read is a thing you have not yet walked in, however true it is, and however many other people it has carried before you. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in 1 Samuel 17:39, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

So he took it off, in front of a king, and went down to the brook, and picked up five stones.

Five. Not a strategy. Not a system. Five is simply what a hand can hold while still leaving you able to run.

And hear me, because this is the part the enemy of your peace has been keeping from you for four years. God did not give the boy five because he had failed to qualify for the armor. God gave him five because five was what that hand could carry to that place on that afternoon. The measure was taken off the boy. It was never taken off the giant.

He is still doing that. Not only in a book about Him, and not only in the century where the good things happened. Here, this morning, over you. He measures against your arms, He always has, and whatever He puts in your hand today He did not make small because you disappointed Him. He made it fit because He has actually looked at you.

Then watch what David does with the small thing, because this is the part that changes what happens in your own room tonight. He does not carry the stone up the hill and hope. He speaks first. He says out loud that he comes in the name of the Lord of hosts, and then the stone leaves his hand. The word went out in front of it.

And the amount of faith Jesus named for the moving of a mountain would not have tipped the scales at all. A seed. He weighed it out that small on purpose, and then He said the part that decides everything: the seed gets spoken to the mountain. Not held up in front of it. Not carried past it in silence for four years. Said.

And if there is a real thing to be looked up on Monday, look it up. Ring the surgery. Read the letter properly. Ask the person who can actually answer it the question you have been going around. None of this is about knowing less. It is about carrying less, and those two have never once been the same thing. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, 1 Samuel 17:39, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.