The Storm and the Chickens and Me

There was a storm in October and my dad was four miles away with a trailer and could not get back for about an hour and a half, and the hens were out.

I want to be accurate about the danger, because I do not want anybody thinking this was more than it was. A storm is not dangerous to a boy in a yard he knows. It is loud. That is the whole of it. It is extremely, enormously loud, and it makes the shed doors do a thing, and the loudness is a completely different problem from danger and nobody ever explains that.

Nineteen hens. They do not come in when it is loud. They go under things, and the things they go under are the wrong things, and the job is to get nineteen hens out from under the wrong things and into a house with a door.

It took forty minutes.

Here is what I remember. I remember the noise the corrugated sheet on the back shed makes, which is a noise I know, and which at four in the afternoon in a storm stops being a noise I know. I remember being extremely wet in about ninety seconds. And I remember counting, out loud, every single time I got one in, because counting out loud is a thing to do with your mouth when there is nobody to talk to.

Bucky stood in the middle of the yard for the entire forty minutes. Not helping, obviously. He was not sheltering either, which is the part I have thought about since, because there was a shed right there and he stood in the open getting rained on and watched me carry hens.

I got to nineteen at about twenty past. And then I sat in the hen house doorway with the door shut behind me, in the dry, with nineteen hens making the noise they make, and I did not go inside for about ten minutes and I could not tell you exactly why.

When Dad got back he did not make a fuss of it, which I was glad about. He counted the hens, said nineteen, and went in and put the kettle on, and about twenty minutes later he said, out of nowhere, that the corrugated sheet sounds worse than it is.

He knew. He had been thinking about it for twenty minutes and worked out what to say and said one sentence, and it was the right one.

Four times when and never if

Isaiah writes a promise with a structure to it, and the structure is the point.

When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee: when thou walkest through the fire, thou shalt not be burned; neither shall the flame kindle upon thee. (Isaiah 43:2)

When thou passest. Not if. And it happens four times in one verse, with waters, rivers, fire and flame, and not one of those four is presented as avoidable.

The promise is not that the weather does not come. It is that somebody is in it, and that a person goes through rather than under, and through is the preposition doing the whole job.

You are being promised company in it rather than an absence of it, and Isaiah 43:2 says when four times and never once says if. It is the Holy Spirit who makes that read as honesty instead of as a disappointment.

That matters at nine and it matters at fifty, because a child who has been promised that nothing bad will happen finds out otherwise fairly quickly, and then decides the whole book was that kind of promise.

You have not been sold anything that the weather can disprove. The written word puts the promise on the presence rather than on the conditions, and His Spirit is what makes an honest promise sturdier than a comfortable one.

What is said just before it

The verse before is the one that explains why anybody is being told any of this.

Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou art mine. (Isaiah 43:1)

Redeemed, called, named, and then thou art mine, and only after all four of those does the weather get mentioned at all.

So the order in that chapter is identity first and conditions second, which is the opposite of the order a person in a yard in a storm arrives at things.

You are somebody named before you are somebody in weather. Isaiah 43:1 gets all the way through belonging before it mentions water, and the Spirit of God is what makes that order stand up in the middle of the loudness.

And a few lines later there is a phrase that is almost too much: that a person was precious in His sight and honored and loved.

You have been described in words nobody would dare use about themselves. Isaiah 43:4 says precious and says loved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a prophet's page into a hen house doorway.