The Year I Kept Saying Next Year

It is the fair that does it. Second week of September, every year, on the same field off the Butler road.

He can smell it from the yard. Fried dough and diesel and the particular smell of a livestock barn in the heat, and the generator on the Ferris wheel that has needed a new muffler since the Clinton administration. And every year, when that smell comes across the fence, something in him says the same six words, and it says them in his own voice, which is the part he has stopped being able to stand.

I will get that sorted next year.

He said it in 1994, when he was twenty-six and had just come back to the Lord after a stretch he does not talk about much, and he meant it. He genuinely meant it. He had a plan that involved a conversation with a man named Roy Pettit, who is buried now up behind the Methodist church, and the conversation kept getting moved because of hay, and then because of a calving that went wrong, and then it was October and it seemed like a spring thing.

He said it in 2001 with two little ones on his hip.

He said it in 2008, and that year is the one that sticks, because his daughter came home from a camp in July absolutely on fire, and she went in that August in a farm pond out past the Vaughn place with about forty people standing on the bank, and he stood on that bank and he cried like a fool and he was so proud of her he could hardly speak. And on the drive home in the truck she said, out of nowhere, "Daddy, when did you do yours?" and he said, "Long time ago, sweetheart," and that was a lie, and it is the only one he has ever told her, and it has sat in him for seventeen years.

He said it in 2016 and 2019 and 2022.

And two weeks ago, sitting on the tailgate with the smell coming across the fence and a fiddle case open beside him because the boys were coming over, he heard himself think it again. Thirty-one Septembers. The same six words in the same voice, worn as smooth as a creek stone.

He is fifty-seven. The tiredness is not about the water. He would be in a pond tomorrow. The tiredness is about being a man who has listened to himself say the same thing for thirty-one years and has stopped believing the man who says it.

What the thirty-one years are not

Let us get one thing out of the road right at the start.

I am not going to ask you to account for them.

There is a version of this that goes back through those Septembers one at a time, looking for the year the excuse stopped being a reason, and I am not doing that, and neither is God. He is not sitting up there with a ledger of your Septembers. He has never once opened it.

Here is what is actually true of you this morning, and I want you to receive it rather than examine it.

There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.Romans 8:1

Look hard at that word now. Not eventually. Not once a thing is put right. Now, this morning, on a tailgate, in September, with the smell of the fair coming across the fence. You are in Christ Jesus and there is therefore no condemnation on you, and that is not a kind thing I am saying, it is the sentence written in the book, and the Holy Spirit is the one making it land in a chest that has been braced for the other thing.

And notice the word therefore. Paul does not say there is no condemnation because you have finally sorted it. He says therefore, which points backward at everything he has just spent seven chapters saying, all of it about what God did and none of it about what the reader managed. The verdict is already in and it went in your favor and you were not consulted.

Now let me say something about the six words themselves, because I want to be careful with them.

Next year is not a sin. It is a symptom, and I think I know what it is a symptom of. A thing that gets postponed thirty-one times is almost never a thing a man does not want. It is a thing a man has attached something to. Somewhere in 1994, between a calving that went wrong and a conversation with Roy Pettit that never happened, this stopped being a simple thing and started being a thing with weight on it, and every year the weight got a little heavier because the delay itself became part of the weight.

You are not carrying thirty-one years of failure. You are carrying one small snowball that has rolled downhill since 1994, and the size of it is not a measure of you. Scripture says the condemnation is gone and the Spirit of God who has been with you on that farm through every one of those Septembers is not agreeing with the accusation you have been running.

I want to speak about the truck, too, and what you said to your daughter.

You are forgiven for that. Fully, and years ago, and the moment you first went quiet about it in the presence of God it was dealt with, because the word says that is how it works and the Spirit does not leave a confessed thing lying around for seventeen years to be found again. If it is still in the room, that is not God bringing it up. He does not do that.

And here is the part I most want you to have, because I think it is the part that will actually change how you sit on that tailgate next September. You have been His the whole way through. Through 1994 and the hay and the calving. Through 2001 with two on your hip. Through that pond and that drive home. The Lord did not spend thirty-one Septembers waiting outside the fence for you to sort something out. Scripture says you are in Christ Jesus, present tense, and the Spirit who has been keeping you all along is the seal on it.