The Yard He Has Not Fixed

The kettle is loud and the yard has not changed since 2017.

He stands at the window most mornings around twenty to seven with a mug in his hand, and the view is the same view. The fence panel on the left has been leaning since the storm, held up by a length of two by four he wedged in that week meaning to do it properly on the Saturday. The bottom step off the deck is soft in the middle and he steps over it now without thinking. There is a rectangle of bare dirt where the pool sat for two summers, and grass has never come back on it. The trailer has a flat tire and has had one long enough that the rubber has gone flat on the bottom in a shape.

And there is a stack of concrete blocks by the shed, twenty two of them, which he bought to make a path.

His wife used to mention it. She stopped about four years ago, and that was worse.

He was thirty one when a man in a church basement, a good man, shook his hand and told him he was a new creation now, the old was gone. He is forty. And standing at this window he could give you the list without pausing: the temper that comes up on the phone with his brother and only with his brother. The three days of going quiet that everybody in this house knows the shape of. The thing he stopped drinking that he still thinks about at four in the afternoon on a Friday. The way he cannot say sorry without putting an if in the middle of it.

Nine years, and he could recite them in order, alphabetically if you wanted.

He is not bitter about it. That is the part nobody would guess. He believes the verse. He has read it a hundred times. He simply cannot make it meet the window, and after this long the not meeting has quietly become the loudest fact in the room, every morning, for about ninety seconds, until the kettle clicks off.

You know the yard. Yours might be a spare room, or a habit with a name, or a conversation you have been having with the same person for eleven years and losing. And you know the list, the one you could recite in order, and the way it sits underneath a sentence somebody said over you once with a real smile on his face.

The deed and the punch list

I run jobs, so let me give you two pieces of paper.

One is the deed. It says who owns the property. It is filed, it is dated, and it does not describe the condition of anything: no deed anywhere says the fence is straight. The other is the punch list, the sheet of everything still outstanding on the job, and it is long by nature, because that is what a punch list is for.

That punch list has been doing duty as the answer to whether the deed went through. It never says. It was never the document that says.

Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.2 Corinthians 5:17

Look where Paul put the condition. Not on the fence, not on the temper, not on nine years. If any man be in Christ. That is a location, and everything after it is announced from there.

You are inside a sentence that was never taking evidence from a list, and you were inside it before you started keeping one. It is written in 2 Corinthians 5:17 that the new creature and the words in Christ arrive in the same clause, and it is the Spirit who makes a clause about location into an actual address a man is standing at with a mug in his hand.

That is not a trick and it is not a comfort I am inventing to get you off the hook. It is how the sentence is built. The old covenant tabernacle was holy because of where it was and Whose it was, not because the fabric was better fabric. Position first. Condition follows, in its own order, on a schedule I have no authority to publish.

You have a deed and a punch list on the same counter, and they are two documents, not one document you have been failing. Scripture files the new creation under in Christ, and it is His Spirit who holds that filing rather than the state of anything visible through the glass.

What the old things actually were

Now, old things are passed away. That line is doing real work, and it is not the work it has been assigned around here.

Read the verse before it. Paul says that from now on he knows no man after the flesh, and even though he once knew Christ that way, he does not any longer. He is talking about a way of reckoning people. An accounting method. The old thing that has passed away, in the sentence's own context, is the old way of counting.

And two verses later he says what God was doing in it: not imputing their trespasses unto them. Not counting. The books that were closed were God's books.

You are looking at a list God has already stopped keeping, and it was closed by a decision that was not yours to make. 2 Corinthians 5:19 says He was not imputing their trespasses, and the Spirit who put that in writing has not gone back to reopen the file while a man stands at a window doing his own arithmetic.

I am not telling you the temper does not matter. It matters. It matters to your brother, and it will get worked on, and the working is the honest labor of a life. What I am saying is that it was never the evidence in the case, and the man who has spent nine years cross examining himself with it has been running a trial that was concluded before he got there.

You have a God who is not counting, and that was settled in writing rather than in a mood. It is written that He does not impute the trespasses, and it is the Spirit who carries that word into the room instead of the sound of anybody's reassurance.

Made, not renovated

Here is the word Paul chose, and he chose it on purpose. Creation.

I renovate buildings and I build new ones, and they are different trades. A renovation works with what is standing: you keep the good joists, you cut out the rot, you improve it, and at the end it is the same building with better parts. A creation is not that. Nobody renovates something into existence.

Paul says new creation. Ephesians says we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus. That language is used about God and about nothing else, and it is used about you in the past tense.

You were made rather than repaired, and that word was chosen deliberately by the man writing it. Ephesians 2:10 says workmanship, created, and the Spirit who moved Paul to reach for the creation word rather than the repair word did not reach carelessly.

And then there is the small word in the middle of the verse that everybody reads past. Behold. It is an instruction and it points somewhere. It does not say examine yourself and behold. It says behold, all things are become new, and the looking is aimed at what God has done, not at the yard.

You have a work in you that somebody else began, and He is the one carrying it through to the end. Philippians 1:6 says He who began a good work will perform it, and it is His Spirit doing that performing, on His timing, with no date published to you or to me.