The Second Cutting

Ask him about the hay and he will talk to you for an hour.

He will tell you that the first cutting is the big one. Heavy, coarse, full of stem, cut early when the ground is still cold and the whole field is racing. It looks impressive on a wagon. Everybody is proud of the first cutting because everybody can see it.

Then he will tell you about the second.

Lighter. Fewer stems, more leaf. Cut in the warm part of the year when the field is not racing any more, and it comes in at maybe half the tonnage. He will tell you that if you have got a horse that matters to you, or a cow you are trying to bring back up, you feed her the second cutting, and any stockman in that county would tell you the same and none of them would think it was worth mentioning because it is simply a known thing.

Less of it. Better feed.

He has said that out loud a hundred times in his life. He said it last August, leaning on the gate, to a neighbor's boy who had asked him a fair question about tonnage.

And he has never once applied it to himself.

Because here is what he privately holds, and he holds it the way a man holds a fact rather than an opinion. He believes his best work is behind him. He would tell you the first stretch was the real one. That is when everything was built, and that is when he was any use, and what has happened since then closed that chapter, and now there is this.

He does not say it bitterly. He does not say it at all. It sits under him the way bedrock sits under a field, and everything he plans is built on top of it.

I am not going to ask you what closed the chapter. Not one word of it. God has it and you have it and that is the whole of who needs it, and nothing in this message wants it opened.

What I want is the gate, and what he said to the boy at it.

God commits to the whole distance, in writing

Isaiah 46 has a verse where God does something unusual. He makes a commitment about a specific stretch of a person's life.

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you.Isaiah 46:4

Count the verbs. Made. Bear. Carry. Deliver. Four of them, and every one has the same subject, and it is not you.

And look at what stretch He puts them in. Not the strong years. Not the building years. He names the far end on purpose, the exact part of the road where a man assumes the help stops because the usefulness has stopped, and He puts the carrying there.

Now put that beside what he told the boy at the gate.

You are in the season where the feed is better and the tonnage is lower, and Isaiah 46:4 puts God's carrying in exactly that stretch, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man believe about himself a thing he has known about a hayfield his whole life.

That is the whole message, and everything else is detail.

Now let me be plain about what this verse does not do, because a plainspoken message ought to be plain in both directions.

It does not promise you the first cutting back. It does not promise tonnage, or the years, or the standing, or the shape any of it used to have, and any man who tells you Isaiah 46 guarantees a particular outcome is selling something. God commits to carrying you through the season. He does not commit to making the season look like the last one.

And I want to say the other half too, because it matters just as much on this ground. A second half that is lighter is not a demotion. Half the tonnage is not half the man. If what is ahead of you is smaller and quieter than what was behind you, that is not the sad part of the story, and a stockman would tell you it is the part he actually wants in the barn.

You have a future that is carried rather than a stretch you have to get across, and Isaiah 46:4 puts four verbs in God's own hands and none in yours, and the Holy Spirit is not conserving Himself for somebody with more years left.

There is one more thing in the verse worth stopping on. I have made, and I will bear. He puts the making and the carrying in the same sentence, by the same person. The One who built you is the same One committing to haul you, which means nothing in your history disqualifies you from the help, because He was there for the building of it.