Three Years Since the Hedge

The hedge is fine now. That is what makes it ridiculous.

It got cut back the following spring, to about the height everyone wanted in the first place, and it has been unremarkable ever since. Nobody would look at that boundary today and know anything had happened.

The two men either side of it have not spoken in three years.

Not a feud. Nothing dramatic, no letters, no council. One bad ten minutes on a Saturday in which both of them said a bit more than they meant, and then a fortnight of avoiding each other while it cooled, and then a month, and by then the not-speaking had set like a slab.

Now it works like this. He hears the back door go next door and he finds a reason to be in the shed. The other man has clearly got a similar system, because in three years of two gardens thirty feet apart they have managed near total avoidance, which takes effort, and both of them are putting it in.

And in the summer, over the fence, he can hear that man's grandchildren, and he does not know their names.

That is your fence. That is your shed. And I have kept boundaries and party walls my whole working life, so let me say something plain about that slab, because it is not as thick as you think and it is not yours to carry alone.

Your half of it, and only your half

Paul writes one sentence about this that is the most realistic verse in the New Testament about difficult people, and most of us only ever hear half of it.

If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.Romans 12:18

Read the two conditions he puts in front, because they are mercy and not weakness. If it be possible, which admits that sometimes it is not. As much as lieth in you, which limits your responsibility to your own side of the fence, precisely, with no overhang.

He does not say make peace. He says live peaceably as far as your reach extends, and then stop, because the other half of a road is not yours to lay.

You have only ever been responsible for your own end of that fence. Not for his answer. Not for whether he thaws. The written word bounds the job at as much as lieth in you, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a relief in a man in a shed rather than one more thing he is failing at.

Now let me name what the slab is actually made of, because it is not anger. You are not an angry man about this. You have not thought about that hedge with any heat in eighteen months.

It is made of the fear of the first sentence. Whoever speaks first has to hold, in that moment, the whole weight of three years, and neither of you wants to be the one standing there holding it.

You are not required to carry three years in one sentence. The written word asks for peaceable living, which is a manner rather than a summit meeting, and the Holy Spirit does not need the row reopened to be settled. Nothing about that Saturday has to be discussed for a man to say afternoon over a fence.

And that is the thing I would most like you to see, because it changes the size of what is in front of you.

You have been imagining a conversation. There is no conversation. There is one ordinary word said at normal volume while you are both outside anyway, about the weather or a wheelbarrow or nothing at all, and the whole business of who was right about a hedge simply never comes up, ever, for the rest of both your lives.

You have the smaller option available today. As much as lieth in you is a small phrase deliberately. The Holy Spirit gives courage for the size of thing that actually fits over a fence, and He is not asking you to reconcile anything out loud.