Both Hands On The Post

They are running the north line in March, which is the only month either of them has time for it, and the ground is soft enough that a man can still set a post without an argument.

Merle holds. Tom drives. That is how it has always gone. Merle gets both hands around the post, sets his boots, and holds it plumb while Tom comes in with the hammer and puts the staple through the wire and into the wood. Two hits, sometimes three. Then they walk to the next one.

There is a coffee can of staples wedged in the crook of a locust post back at the truck. There is a killdeer working the far end of the field, running and stopping and running, the way they do. The wire sings a little when Tom pulls it up with the come-along and lets it settle.

Merle has been thinking about his brother since post number four.

He has not said his brother's name out loud one time this morning. Not once. He has held ninety posts and thought about him at every one of them, and the whole thing has gone on inside a man's chest with no sound coming out at all.

Around post sixty something his hands start doing that thing where they will not be quite steady, and Tom looks at him for half a second and then looks back at the staple and hits it. Neither one says anything. Merle takes a better grip and they keep going.

At the end of the line Tom stands up and puts the hammer in the can and says the fence looks decent, and Merle says it does, and that is the whole conversation.

That is you, maybe, on your own line. Holding something plumb for somebody you love, all day, every day, with no sound coming out.

The job of the man who holds

I want to be exact about what Merle is doing out there, because a man in his position almost always gets the job description wrong, and the wrong one is crushing.

Merle is not building the fence. He is holding the post. Those are two different jobs and only one of them is his. If the staple goes in crooked that is not his crooked staple. If a post rots out in four years that is not his rot. His entire assignment is to keep one piece of wood from moving while somebody else does the driving, and he does it, ninety times, and it is real work and it matters and it is not the same job as being responsible for the fence.

Now hear the passage this whole page stands on, and notice who does what in it.

But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun.Exodus 17:12

Aaron and Hur did not win that battle. Read it again if you need to. They did not decide the outcome, they did not out pray anybody, and nowhere in that chapter does God tell them the day depends on their grip. They held. That was the whole of it, and the text honors them for it forever.

You are one of the two men on the arms, and you were given the holding and not the winning. Exodus 17:12 assigns those jobs and I am not assigning them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old sentence about a hill in the desert land on a man holding a fence post in March.

What they did about heavy hands

Look at the first thing in that verse, because most people skip it to get to the good part. Moses' hands were heavy. The text says so, plainly, with no embarrassment about it whatsoever.

And what did they do about the heaviness? They took a stone and put it under him and sat him down. That is the least heroic solution in Scripture and it is right there in the middle of a battle. Nobody told Moses to try harder. Nobody suggested he lacked something. They got him a rock to sit on.

So I will say this as plainly as I know how. A longer prayer would not change it. A more intense one would not change it. Praying at three in the morning instead of nine at night would not change it, and the reason your brother's situation is what it is has nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of a tired man's grip on a fence post. If somebody has hinted otherwise to you, in a hallway or a parking lot or a small group, they were wrong and they did you harm. Nobody here failed to have enough faith. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true.

Here is the honest word, both halves in the same breath. God heals. He heals bodies, He does it still, He does it through the people caring for him and He does it apart from them. And I do not promise you an outcome, because that is His to decide and it never was mine to hand out, and any page that promises you a specific result for your brother is handing you something God did not say. Keep his appointments with him. Keep taking him what he needs taken. The God who hears you is not in a contest with the people caring for his body.

You have a stone under you that God put there, and you were never asked to hold with unheavy hands. It stands written that they sat him down before they ever held him up, and the same Spirit who moved them to fetch that stone is the one who has been quietly getting rocks under you for years.

And one thing before we go further, because the ones who hold are the ones nobody checks on. If this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if the thought has come that everybody would have an easier time of it without you in the middle, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you tonight. You are not the strong one who is exempt from that. A page cannot do it, and you deserve somebody on your side of the post.