I Was Wrong About the Neighbor

The gate between us and Hollis was open on a Tuesday morning and Bucky was in his young grass, which is the worst place on either farm for a goat to be.

I decided Hollis had left it. I did not investigate. I stood there at half past six with a rope in my hand and I put the whole thing together in about nine seconds, and the thing I put together included a history, because we had words about that gate in the spring and there was a fence line thing before that going back to his father and mine.

I said it to three people that week.

I want to be exact about who, because the exactness is the whole of what I am owning here. I said it to my brother on the telephone. I said it to a man at the feed store who has no connection to Hollis whatsoever. And I said it, in the mildest and worst version, to Mrs. Ames after church, in that voice people use when they are not accusing anybody of anything.

On the Friday Toby was up at that gate with me and he was messing about with the latch the way a boy does, and he showed me that if you lift the gate and push, the catch rides up over the keep. It is a worn keep. It has probably been worn for two years. Any animal leaning on that gate opens it, and we have an animal whose entire profession is leaning on gates.

I went to Hollis on the Saturday and told him what I had thought and what I had said and who I had said it to.

That was the hardest four minutes I have had in about a decade, and it was harder than it needed to be, because the going to Hollis is only half the job and I knew what the other half was while I was standing there.

I rang my brother that night. I saw the man at the feed store in October and told him. And I went and found Mrs. Ames after church the following Sunday, which took me nine days to work up to, and she was so kind about it that I felt worse rather than better and that is fine and that is not her fault.

Confess to one another, and the phrase is doing work

James writes a sentence that most people know half of.

Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed. The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. (James 5:16)

One to another. Not only upward. The vertical part of confession is real and it is elsewhere in Scripture and nothing here reduces it, and James adds a horizontal direction that most people would rather not have.

And the reason attached is healing. Not punishment, not fairness, not even justice. That ye may be healed, which suggests that something in a person stays unwell while a thing said in a room is left standing in that room.

You are being pointed toward the room rather than only toward heaven, and James 5:16 says one to another in plain words. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as medicine rather than as an extra bill.

There is an arithmetic that nobody warns a man about. A thing said to three people has to be unsaid to three people, and unsaying it is four times harder than saying it, and it does not get easier with each one.

You have not been asked to do the hard version because God enjoys watching. The written word attaches healing to the confessing rather than a penalty, and His Spirit is what makes that the reason a person picks up a telephone at night.

The verse right before it, and who it is for

The context of that instruction is not a courtroom. It is a sickroom, which changes the temperature of the whole thing.

Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. (James 5:14)

The confessing sentence arrives in the middle of a passage about people being cared for. It is not filed under discipline. It is filed under health, and the people doing the listening in that passage are the same people doing the praying.

You are in a passage about being looked after rather than a passage about being called to account. James 5:14 sets the room before James 5:16 gives the instruction, and the Spirit of God is what makes the setting change how the instruction sounds.

And the last thing James says in the whole letter is about going and getting somebody who has wandered off, which is the note the book chooses to end on.

You have been written to by somebody whose last word was about going after people rather than about being right. James 5:20 closes the letter on restoration, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that into a man's actual week and a man's actual list.