The Neighbor Who Never Said Sorry About the Fence

In 2015 the boundary between us and Ferris got moved about eleven feet and I have never had a word of acknowledgment about it in the whole time since.

I am going to be careful how I tell this, because Toby reads what I write and because Ferris is still alive and still farming and we still speak.

Here is what I believe happened. There was an old thorn hedge on that line and it came out in a wet winter, and when the new fence went up it went up eleven feet on my side of where the hedge had been, and I was not there that week and I did not see it go up.

Here is what Ferris believes happened. The hedge was the boundary, the hedge came out, and the fence went where the fence went, and the eleven feet is because a hedge is wide and a fence is not.

Both of those are honest positions. That is the thing that has made this eleven years long instead of eleven days. If he had done it knowingly I could have gone round there in 2015 and had it out and it would be over. There is nothing to have out with a man who has not done anything as far as he can see.

Eleven feet along about four hundred yards is about a tenth of an acre. I want to be plain about the size of it, because the size of it is not why I still know the number.

I know the number because I have kept it. I have carried a tenth of an acre for eleven years and taken it out and looked at it, mostly in the winter, mostly when something else was already wrong, and it has been very reliable company.

Toby asked me two summers ago why we do not use the bottom gate to get to the top field, which is the obvious way and adds four minutes to go round. And I heard myself say, that is Ferris's ground now, in a voice, in front of a nine year old, about a tenth of an acre.

Bucky, of course, has been through that fence about two hundred times and has never once recognized the boundary in any form, and Ferris brings him back and I bring his ewes back, and neither of us has ever mentioned the line while doing it.

I went round in the fall after that. I did not raise the fence. I said I had been thinking about the bottom gate and asked if he minded us using it, and he said, why on earth would I mind, and that was the whole of it.

The sentence He added after the prayer

Having finished teaching the prayer, He goes back and picks up one line out of it and expands only that one.

For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. (Matthew 6:14, 15)

He does not expand any of the other lines. Not the bread, not the kingdom, not the deliverance. He goes back for the forgiving one, which tells you he expected it to be the sticking point, and He was right about every congregation since.

And the thing to notice is what it is not saying. It is not describing a payment or a bargain. It is describing a channel, and a channel that is closed at one end is closed.

You are being told about a channel rather than about a transaction, and Matthew 6:14 puts the two directions in one sentence. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as an explanation rather than as a threat.

Trespasses is worth stopping on for a man with a boundary problem. The word is about stepping over a line, and it is the word used in the prayer, and I have read that prayer out loud in a church about two thousand times without ever once hearing it as a word about ground.

You have not been asked to agree about where the line is. The written word makes forgiving a thing done about a trespass rather than a thing done after a survey, and His Spirit is what makes that distinction land in a man who has been right for eleven years.

What the man in the parable was holding

There is a parable told right after Peter's question about how often, and the arithmetic in it is deliberately absurd.

But the same servant went out, and found one of his fellowservants, which owed him an hundred pence: and he laid hands on him, and took him by the throat, saying, Pay me that thou owest. (Matthew 18:28)

He has just been released from ten thousand talents, which is a sum designed to be unpayable, and he goes out and finds a man who owes him about a hundred days of wages, which is a real debt and is not nothing.

That is the part people miss. The hundred pence is a genuine debt. Nobody in that story says it was imaginary. The parable is not saying that what somebody owes you is small, it is saying that the person holding the account was carrying something else at the same time and had forgotten what had happened to it.

You are holding a real debt and standing inside a much larger release, and Matthew 18:28 lets both of those be true. The Spirit of God is what makes remembering the second one possible without pretending about the first.

And what the account did to him is described in one detail: he laid hands on the man and took him by the throat. A man carrying an account eventually puts his hands on somebody.

You have been kept from becoming that, and the passage shows exactly what it costs to stay open. Matthew 18:30 has him throwing a man in prison over it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from an ancient story into a voice a man hears himself using in front of his own son.