Mountains Round About

The good sound is when a stone goes down and does not rock. You know it in your wrists before you hear it. Everything else is trial: lift, turn it, look at the face, try the other end, put it back in the pile and take another.

He has been at that wall for three summers. It is honest work and he is good at it now, better than he was, and there is a stretch near the gate where the courses run so true that a man who knows walls would slow down passing it. On a Saturday he can be out there from seven until the light goes and not say a word to anybody, and come in with his hands ruined and sleep like a stone himself.

Nobody would call it hiding. That is the thing. It is the most respectable work in the world.

But if you asked him, and he answered honestly, he could tell you which course went up the summer his father died. Which one went up after the friendship that did not end in an argument, just went quiet the way they do, one unreturned message at a time until returning it would have been strange. Which one went up when the family moved four hours away, for perfectly good reasons, with real affection, and the visits got to be twice a year and then not.

And here is the part he has never said out loud to anybody: the wall does not enclose anything. It runs along the top of a field and stops.

You have your own version, and yours is probably not made of stone. Yours is a set of moves, and you are excellent at them. The joke that arrives exactly when the conversation gets near. The busy week that is genuinely busy. The warmth you give out at full strength, generously, right up to a line you have never had to explain to anybody, because nobody has ever noticed there was one.

The first thing the psalm says is that you cannot be moved

Two verses. They were sung by people walking uphill toward a city, which is worth knowing, because they were looking at the thing they were singing about.

They that trust in the LORD shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth for ever. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the LORD is round about his people from henceforth even for ever.Psalm 125:1-2

Take the first verse on its own for a moment, because it answers something you have been carrying that is older than the wall.

Cannot be removed. The comparison is not to a strong man or a well defended position. It is to a landform. A mountain is not holding on. It is not resisting anything. It has no strategy, and it does not have a good week and a bad week, and nothing about its staying depends on its condition.

You are as firmly set as a mountain in that psalm, and none of that setting is being done by your grip. Psalm 125:1 says the one who trusts cannot be removed, and the Holy Spirit did the fixing in place, which is why the losses you have taken did not shift it a foot.

I want to say something about the wall before we go on, and I mean it. It is not stupidity and it is not sin, and I am not going to talk to you as though it were. A man who has had things taken from him three times learns a rule, and the rule works, and it has genuinely reduced the damage. You built something intelligent out of real experience. That deserves to be said before anything else is.

A wall is maintained. A mountain was already there.

Now the second verse, and this is where it turns.

As the mountains are round about Jerusalem. Those hills were not put there by anybody in that city. Nobody quarried them, nobody set them, and no council ever voted on their upkeep. They were standing round that ground before there was a gate or a name, and when the city was at its lowest and could not have organized the mending of a fence, the ridge line had not moved a stone.

That is the whole difference between what you have and what He has.

A wall is a thing you build. It stands as long as you keep at it, and it fails wherever you stopped, and every year of your life it wants more of you than the year before. You know exactly how much of you it takes, because you have paid it every Saturday for three summers.

A mountain requires nothing from the people it surrounds. Not one hour. Not on your good years and not on the year you had nothing at all.

You are surrounded by a keeping you did not build and are not required to maintain, and it holds on the days when there is nothing left of you. That is written down in Psalm 125:2 as geography rather than as encouragement, and His Spirit has never once asked you to hold up the ridge.

And read the object of that sentence, because it is not singular. Round about his people. The keeping is over a people, and you are inside it the way a house is inside a valley: not by holding a position, but by being where He put you.

You have a place inside what He is keeping, and it does not depend on your strength this year or on anybody staying. Scripture says the Lord is round about His people from henceforth even for ever, and the Spirit holds you inside that plural without any help from your grip, on a plan you were never handed for approval.