Staking Beans in June

Runner beans want eight foot canes and they want them in before the plant knows what it is doing, and he has been doing this on that plot for thirty-one years and he has never once been late.

June. The light goes long down the plots about seven and everything smells of cut grass and somebody's bonfire that they are not supposed to have lit. Two rows in, canes crossed and tied at the top, the twine going round and back the way his father did it. Fred is over the fence talking about compost, which is what Fred talks about, and specifically about whether you can put rhubarb leaves in, which is a thing they have now discussed in some form every June since 2009.

He answers. He is good company. He is the one everybody on that site borrows things from and nobody has ever heard raise his voice.

And a fortnight back, in the last real blow of the spring, the row at the far end went over. Not his fault. The wind came round from a direction it does not usually come from and it came at half past two in the morning and it took a fence panel off two plots down as well. He staked them back up the next day and lost maybe four plants out of thirty.

And when he was doing it, kneeling in the wet, he caught himself thinking a sentence he has thought his whole adult life. Should have been stronger.

He was not talking about the beans.

If you know that sentence, come and sit on the bench by the shed with me a minute. Something was done to you, a long way back, by another person. And somewhere in you a verdict got filed that says a thing which went over must have been weak to start with, and you have been serving that verdict quietly ever since.

I am not going to ask what it was. Not now, not later, not at the end of this. I am not going to ask you to say a word about it to any human being, ever, and nothing in this message wants the thing itself.

Nobody ever put a bean row on trial

Here is the thing about that row at the far end, and I want you to look straight at it.

You did not stand over it and ask it what it had done. You did not conclude anything about its character. You did not decide it had been asking for it by growing where it grew. You got the canes and the twine and you knelt down in the wet at seven in the morning and you put it back up, and you were not being kind to it, you were doing the plain and obvious thing that a man does with a thing that has been knocked over by weather.

The wind was the wind. The row was a row. Everybody on that site knows which one of those did something.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Bindeth up. That is a gardener's word and it is a doctor's word and it is the same job in both trades: you do not scold a broken thing, you support it while it carries on growing. There is no examination in that verse. There is no assessment of whether the break was deserved. There is a break, and there is a binding, and the binding is God's own work.

You are being bound up by God Himself, and you were never the one on trial in that weather. I am not handing you my opinion there. The written word puts healing and binding in His hands and puts no questions in front of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it down to where a man actually lives.

Strong things go over too

I want to say something about the word strong, because it has been used on you and it has been used wrongly.

An oak comes down in a gale. Every man on this site could name you one. That does not make it a poor oak, and no forester in the world stands in front of a fallen oak wondering what it did to deserve the weather. A thing that is knocked over tells you about the force that hit it. It tells you nothing whatsoever about the thing.

You were not weak. You were in the path of something that had a will of its own, and the will belonged to somebody else. That is not the same as fragility and it never has been, and the two have been welded together in you for thirty years by a verdict nobody ever read out.

You are strong the way a staked row is strong, and you were held up rather than found wanting. Scripture says His strength is made perfect in weakness, which means God has never once treated a break as a disqualification, and it is His Spirit, not a decision a man makes on a wet morning, who carries that all the way in.