The Man Who Moves With the Harvest

He knows the ground of four counties the way most men know one back yard. He knows which field near the river drains badly and floods the low corner every third year. He knows the orchard where the third row from the north is always ten days behind the rest and nobody has ever worked out why. He knows the exact place in a certain lane where the phone signal comes back after eleven miles of nothing.

He does not own an inch of any of it. He arrives when the work arrives and leaves when it ends, and he has been doing that for fourteen years, and the four towns have become a kind of orbit he does not choose so much as follow. Bunkhouse in the spring. A room above a shop in the summer. A trailer in the fall that smells of the last man's cigarettes. Then the winter place, which is the least bad of them, and then it starts again.

Here is the part he has never said out loud, and I want to say it before anything else, because it deserves to be said and it has not been. In fourteen years, nobody has ever asked him to stay. Not once. They ask him to come back. That is different, and he knows it is different, and he has known it since about the fourth year. Come back means we need the work done. Stay means we want you here. He has been wanted for the work every single season of his adult life and he has never in his life been asked to stay.

That is a real wound and it should not be hurried past. If it is the wound, then it is the wound, and no verse should be dropped on top of it before it has been allowed to be what it is. Plenty of people carry this one without a harvest anywhere near it: contract workers, substitutes, the person always brought in and never brought on. I am not going to promise anybody that somebody is about to ask them to stay. I have no word about that. What I have is a word about the man on the tailgate.

A man says this while he is packing

Let me put a line in front of us, and I want to notice where the man saying it actually was.

He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved.Psalm 62:6

David wrote that. And depending on which season of his life you place it in, he was either in a cave, or in a wilderness, or in a camp, or on the far side of a river with everything he owned on a mule. He is not a man writing from a settled house about how nice it is to be settled. He is a man in motion, saying out loud that he cannot be moved, and he is not confused, and it is not a contradiction.

The reason is in the first three words. He only. The immovable thing in that verse is not a location and it is not the man. It is a Rock, named as a Person, and the whole claim is that the Rock does not move, and that the man is attached to it, and therefore the man cannot be relocated in the sense that matters, however many times the mule gets loaded.

You are unmoved, and it is a Rock you did not quarry that makes the claim true. That is not a nice thing to say to somebody at the end of a season. It is what is written in Psalm 62, and it is the Spirit who takes a written line and sets it in a chest at the edge of a picked field. The four towns are provisional. The Rock is not.

And notice one more thing, because it is the thing that speaks straight to a man nobody has asked to stay. The psalm does not say I have a place. It says He only is my rock, and it is possessive. My. Not lent. Not seasonal. Not renewed each year at somebody else's discretion.

You have a Rock that is yours, in the possessive, and no crew leader anywhere has ever been given a vote on that. Psalm 62 is the line it rests on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves it from a page into a body that has been loading a truck every October since he was twenty-two.

About never being asked to stay

Now I want to come back to the wound, because I refuse to leave it lying there under a verse.

Being wanted for what a person does and never for who they are is a specific injury, and it does something particular to a person over fourteen years. It teaches a man to lead with usefulness. It makes him excellent, and it makes him excellent in a way that keeps him at arm's length, because if the work is the reason he is welcome, then the work had better be very good, and there is no room in that arrangement for him to be tired or ordinary or simply present.

I want to say plainly that this is not his fault and it is not a character defect. It is what a body learns after enough seasons.

The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner.Psalm 118:22

Jesus quotes that line about Himself. And I want it in front of a man who has been useful and never chosen, because it is about somebody the builders looked at, evaluated for a job, and set aside. He knows this. Whatever the tailgate feels like in October, the One on the Rock has been the man nobody asked to stay, and He was not confused about His own value while it was happening.

You were chosen before any crew ever evaluated you, and the choosing was not seasonal. It is written that He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4), and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an eternal decision land in a man in a work jacket.

You are wanted, and not for the work. Scripture puts the choosing before the founding of the world, which means it happened before there was a field, a crew or a harvest to be useful in, and it is the Spirit of God who presses that into a place that has been sore for fourteen years.

If the seasons ever turn dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor the truth about the winters. Being fixed to the Rock has never been a reason to sit alone with something that needs a real person in the room.