The Long Way Round the Gate

There is a gate on Ross Mackle's own land that he has not walked through in three winters.

It is a good gate. He hung it himself. It opens onto the top of the west field and from there it is about four hundred yards to the far corner, which is where he needs to be most mornings between February and April.

He goes the other way. Down the lane, along the bottom, up through the wet ground by the drain, and out to the corner from underneath. It takes eleven extra minutes and it is genuinely worse walking, and he has done it every morning for three years.

If you asked him, he would tell you it is the mud. He has said it out loud twice, to two different people, both of whom nodded, because it is a reasonable thing to say about that field in February. It is not entirely untrue either. There is mud.

But he has walked through worse mud in his life about four thousand times without giving it a thought, and the eleven extra minutes take him past the drain, which is wetter.

The reason is not the mud.

The reason is what happened up at that gate, which is a thing nobody knows and nobody witnessed, and which is now three years old and has not got one bit smaller for being three years old.

Here is the part that would surprise anybody watching him.

He does not think about it when he goes the long way. That is the strange mercy of a habit. The first winter he thought about it every single morning and it was awful. The second winter it was about twice a week. Now, the third winter, he does not think about it at all. His feet turn left at the bottom of the yard on their own and he is halfway along the wet ground before any part of him has been consulted.

The detour has become the road. The going round has become the way there. And a man can live an entire life like that, walking eleven extra minutes a day, and never once say a word to anybody about a gate.

And this is where I stop writing about Ross, because you have a gate.

It might not be ground. It might be a subject, a month, a name, a photograph in a box you have not moved in years. Something your route bends around now without asking you first. I am not going to ask what happened there. Not once, in this whole message. That is yours and it stays yours.

He told God and God did the rest

I want to give you a verse that a lot of people have been made afraid of, and I want to show you what it actually says, because the fear is in the reading and not in the text.

I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions unto the LORD; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin.Psalm 32:5

Now. Look at who is in that sentence.

Two people. David and God. That is the entire cast. There is no third party in the verse, there is no room, there is no leader, there is no group, there is nobody standing by to receive an account. Unto thee. Unto the LORD.

That matters more than almost anything else on this page, because half the reason a gate stays unvisited for three years is a quiet certainty that dealing with it means saying it to somebody in a chair opposite you.

Not in this verse. The whole transaction runs between a man and God, and the second half of the line is not something David did. It is something that happened to him: and thou forgavest. He turns up at the gate and the forgiving is already coming the other way.

So take this where your feet actually go in the morning. You are met at the gate, and Psalm 32:5 puts the whole exchange between you and God with no third chair in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ground walkable rather than you working up the nerve.

And look at the tense of it, because David wrote this after. The forgiving is done. He is not campaigning for it in that verse; he is reporting it. Which means the gate you have been going round for three winters has not been sitting there for three winters accumulating anything. Scripture says the account was settled, and His Spirit is the one who keeps saying so in a person until they finally hear it.