The Row I Weeded That Nobody Walks Down

The back row of the vegetable garden runs behind the shed and there is no path to it and there is no reason to go there, and it is the best kept row on this farm.

I want to explain the geography, because the geography is the point. There is a shed. The garden is in front of the shed and everybody walks up the front, and behind the shed there is a strip about four feet wide and thirty feet long that grows things perfectly well and that a person can only reach by going round the end.

Nobody goes round the end. Not visitors, not Mrs. Ames, not anybody in eleven years except me and, twice, a man reading a meter.

I keep it beautifully. That is the thing I have been sitting with. It is not neglected because nobody sees it, it is the opposite, and I could not tell you why and I have tried.

It is not for a reward, because there is no possible mechanism by which anybody would ever see it and I know that better than anybody. It is not for the crop, because the crop from that row is the same as the crop from any other row and goes into the same kitchen.

The closest I have got is that it would bother me. Which sounds like nothing and is, I think, actually a whole thing that I do not have better words for.

Toby found it when he was about six. He came round the end after a ball and he came back round and asked me who had done that, and I said I had, and he asked when, and I said mostly on Sundays, and he looked at me for slightly longer than a six year old usually looks at anybody.

He goes round the end now sometimes. Not to help. He goes and stands at the end of it and comes back.

Bucky has never been down that row. There is nothing in it he wants and no way in that is faster than the way to something else, and it is the only strip of ground on this farm he has never damaged, which is very nearly a joke and is not quite one.

The strange way that sentence is built

The writer of Hebrews says something about God's memory and he builds it as a double negative, which is not how anybody writes unless they mean something specific.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister. (Hebrews 6:10)

Not unrighteous to forget. He does not say God remembers, which would be the plain way to put it. He says that forgetting would be unrighteous and that God is not unrighteous, which makes the remembering a matter of justice rather than of affection.

That is a much stronger claim. A kind person might remember. A just one cannot forget without ceasing to be just.

You are held in a memory that is a matter of righteousness rather than of fondness, and Hebrews 6:10 builds it as a double negative on purpose. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as security instead of as a technicality.

And look at what is described as being remembered: the work and the labor of love. Not results. Not fruit. The work and the labor, which are inputs rather than outputs, and which is what a person actually has to give.

You have not been assessed on what came of it. The written word names the labor itself as the thing not forgotten, and His Spirit is what makes that a rest for somebody who cannot point at an outcome.

The present tense at the end

The verse finishes with a small phrase that changes its temperature: and do minister.

He has just described work in the past tense and then adds, almost as an aside, that they are still doing it. Which means the letter is written to people in the middle rather than to people looking back, and the encouragement is for the ongoing thing rather than for a completed one.

And the sentence after it says what the writer wants for them, and it is not success.

And we desire that every one of you do shew the same diligence to the full assurance of hope unto the end. (Hebrews 6:11)

Unto the end. The aim named for a person in the middle of unwitnessed work is not that it should be recognized but that they should keep going with assurance in it.

You are being asked for the same diligence rather than for a different outcome. Hebrews 6:11 names continuing as the target, and the Spirit of God is what makes that a real thing to want.

And the writer calls them beloved in the very next verse, which is what a person does when they know a letter has been hard reading.

You have been addressed warmly by somebody who knew this was heavy. Hebrews 6:9 opens with beloved before any of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a letter into a strip of ground behind a shed.