The Bull in the Top Field

Hollis kept a bull in the field next to our top gate for about eighteen months, and for two years I went round.

I want the arithmetic in that first sentence noticed, because it is the whole story. Eighteen months of bull. Two years of going round. There was a bull in that field, and then there was not a bull in that field, and I kept going round for six months after the animal had gone to another farm.

Going round is four minutes. It is up the headland and along the hedge and back down, and it is four minutes with a vehicle and about eleven on foot, and I did it perhaps four hundred times.

I never once decided to keep doing it. That is what I would want any man to hear. There was no morning where I stood at that gate and thought about the bull and chose the long way. By about month four it was simply the route, and by the second year it was so much the route that when a man asked me for directions I gave him the long way without thinking.

Toby asked me. Of course he did. He asked me in the truck when he was about eight and he asked it the way children ask, which is without any weight on it: why do we not just go through the top gate.

And I said, because of the bull. And he said, what bull.

I would like to tell you I went through the top gate that afternoon and I did not. I went through it about three weeks later, on my own, early, and I opened that gate and stood in a field with nothing in it whatsoever and felt a fool, and it is one of the more instructive minutes of my life.

Bucky, needless to say, had been going through that gate the entire time, both directions, whenever he pleased, in complete disregard of a bull who had been extremely real for eighteen months. He is not brave. That is a different article. But he had a better map than I did.

Three given, one not

Paul writes to a young man who is frightened and names four things in one sentence.

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. (2 Timothy 1:7)

One negative and three positives. And the three are worth taking separately, because the third one is the one nobody quotes and it is the one that mends a map.

Power is capacity. Love is the direction it points. And a sound mind is a phrase about being sound in the head, sober, having judgment that works, and it is the one a man needs when he has been driving the long way for six months past the end of a reason.

You have been given something that mends your own judgment, and 2 Timothy 1:7 lists a sound mind alongside power and love. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as an equipment list rather than as a rebuke.

Fear does not usually feel like fear after a while. It feels like a route. It becomes the sensible way round, and the reason for it drops off the back and nobody notices, and a man will defend the long way with reasons that are all about time and gates and none of them about a bull.

You have not been left with a map nobody ever checks. The written word puts soundness of mind in the list of what was given, and His Spirit is what makes a person look at a route they stopped choosing years ago.

Timothy was actually frightened

The letter around that verse is worth reading, because it is not an abstract encouragement.

Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands. (2 Timothy 1:6)

Stir up. It is a word about a fire that has gone down to embers. Paul is not telling him to acquire anything, he is telling him that the thing is present and has settled, which is what happens to a fire nobody has poked.

And two verses later he says be not thou therefore ashamed, which tells you plainly what state the young man was in. He was not lacking equipment. He had gone quiet.

You are being asked to stir something rather than to obtain it. 2 Timothy 1:6 puts the gift already inside and only needing rousing, and the Spirit of God is what makes that far less frightening than starting from nothing.

And Paul writes the whole letter from a prison, which he mentions in the same paragraph, and asks the young man not to be ashamed of him.

You have been written to by somebody in a worse position than you. 2 Timothy 1:8 has a prisoner encouraging a free man, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a letter into a truck with a nine year old asking a plain question.