Talking to the Horse

The yard light is on a sensor that has never worked properly and comes on about four minutes after you actually need it, so the first part of every morning is done half by feel.

Six boxes. He does them in the same order he has done them in for nine years, and the barrow has a wheel that goes at the exact moment you have got it full, and everybody who has ever pushed it knows.

Box three is a chestnut mare who is nervous of nothing in particular and everything in general, and she has been like that since she came, and nobody knows what happened to her before because nobody who could tell them is still around.

He talks to her the whole time.

Not baby talk. He would be embarrassed. It is low and it is steady and it is genuinely conversational, and it goes: there we are. That is it. Nobody is doing anything to you. There we are, girl. Same as yesterday. It is only me. And she comes down off the wall of the box by about the third sentence, every single morning, and puts her head over his shoulder, and lets him get on.

He has never in his life spoken to himself that way. Not once, in twenty years.

The thing that runs in his head about himself is a different register altogether, and it started a long way back, and it started because of something another person did.

Now. I want to say who I am talking to before anything else. Today I am talking to you, the one whose weight belongs entirely to what somebody else did. I will not ask you what it was, not now and not later. I will not ask you to tell one human being anything, ever. Nothing here wants the thing itself.

Where the acceptance is actually located

Let me name the thing first, because nothing gets lifted before it is named.

You have kindness. There is no shortage of it in you, and everything in that yard knows it, and the mare in box three would go through a wall for you. What you do not have is any way of turning it round.

And you have tried. You have been told to try. Somebody probably told you to speak to yourself the way you speak to a friend, and it is not bad advice as far as it goes, and you have found that you cannot make it reach, and then that failure went on the pile with everything else.

So I am not going to ask you to generate it. Here is a different thing.

To the praise of the glory of his grace, wherein he hath made us accepted in the beloved.Ephesians 1:6

Read where the acceptance is kept.

In the beloved. Not in you. Not in your capacity to feel it, not in your record, not in how the morning went. The acceptance is located in Christ, and you are located in Him, and that is the whole architecture of the sentence.

Which means it is not a thing you are being asked to produce. It is a place you are being told you are standing.

You are accepted in the Beloved, and you were placed there rather than asked to arrange it. I am not offering you a technique. The written word puts the acceptance inside Christ and puts you inside Christ, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and gets it into a man half feeling his way round a yard before the light comes on.

He is not asking you to be your own friend

Here is the second thing, and it is a relief.

Nowhere does Scripture put the burden of your own acceptance on your own kindness. That is a modern arrangement and it is heavy and it does not work, because the person being asked to supply the kindness is the same person the kindness is about, and if that mechanism worked in you it would have worked twenty years ago.

God's method is different. He does not ask a man to think better of himself. He puts him somewhere.

And notice what the verse says the whole thing is for. To the praise of the glory of his grace. The point of your acceptance is not even primarily about you. It is a display of what He is like, which means arguing about whether you qualify is arguing about somebody else's generosity in front of them.

You are standing inside an acceptance that was never your job to feel, and you were put there for the display of His kindness rather than your own. Scripture makes His grace the subject of that sentence and not your capacity, and it is His Spirit, not an effort of will at half past five in the morning, who lets a man rest inside a place he has been put.