The Promise You Broke By Christmas

The road up the hill turned to loose stone in the last mile, and by the time he came over the rise the light had gone the color of apricots.

He had not meant to stop here. He had meant to be three villages further on by dark. But the wind came up off the plain and his water was low, and there was one house on the ridge with the door standing open and a lamp already lit inside it, which in that country is not decoration. It is a sentence. It says come in.

The host met him in the yard before he had finished tying the animal. Took the bag off his shoulder without asking. Set a basin down on the step and poured water over his hands himself, an old man doing a young man's job and not letting anybody else near it.

Then the bread came out, and the salt with it in a small dish chipped on one side, and the host tore the loaf and put half of it into the traveler's hands and said the thing that is said at that table. You are in the house now.

They ate. They laughed about the road and about a bridge that had been out for nine years. The host's grandsons came and went. Somebody brought figs. The lamp burned low and was topped up twice.

And somewhere in the second hour the traveler worked out whose house he was in.

He knew the family name. He knew what his own father had done to this family over a strip of land and a diverted watercourse, twenty years back, and how it had ended, and who had been on the losing side of it. He sat there with bread in his hand and heard his own name in his head the way this family must say it.

He waited until the house was quiet. Then he got his bag and went to the door.

The host was sitting on the step with his hand on the latch, the way a man sits when he has been sitting there a while.

"I know who I am," the traveler said. "I should not have eaten at your table."

"You did, though," the old man said.

"You did not know."

"I knew in the yard," he said. "I knew before the water was poured."

The traveler stood there with the bag on his shoulder and could not think of one thing to do with his hands.

"The bread is eaten," the host said. "The salt is eaten. That was settled at the table, and it was not settled by you." He moved his hand on the latch, but not to open it. "You cannot un-eat it. Go to bed."

The bread was broken before you knew whose house it was

You know the table. Not the one on the ridge. Yours. A kitchen table with a scorch ring in the varnish where somebody set a hot pan down a generation ago, and a nineteen year old sitting at it after the rest of the house had gone to bed, with a cheap spiral notebook open and a pen that skipped.

You meant it. That is the part nobody has ever given you credit for. It was not a resolution. It was a promise, and you made it to God with your elbows on that table.

And by Christmas it was gone. Not dramatically. It quietly stopped being true some week in November when the tiredness won and nobody was watching.

Ever since then an arithmetic has been running at the back of your head, so old now that you no longer hear it as an argument. It goes like this: a person who could not keep his own word for four months is not somebody God is going to stay close to. So the distance is fair. So do not complain about it.

I am not going to argue you out of that arithmetic. I am going to walk you out to a field at sunset and show you who did the cutting.

Abraham asked God for a thing nobody should be able to ask. How am I to know. And God did not answer with an explanation. He answered with a ceremony, and it was the ceremony every man in that country understood, because it was how agreements were made where there were no courts. The animals were brought and divided and laid in two rows with a path between them. Blood on the ground on both sides. It is not a figure of speech and I will not soften it. Walking that path said one thing: let it be to me as it is to these, if I break my word to you.

Abraham never walked it.

Read it again, even if you knew it as a child. A deep darkness came over him, and what moved down that path between the pieces was a smoking fire pot and a burning torch, and no man at all. One party walked. God swore the oath from both sides of the table.

Hear this, because it is the exact thing you sat down at that kitchen table trying to earn. You are inside an agreement whose only signature is God's own, and your name stands in it as an heir and never as a guarantor. Scripture says He confirmed it with an oath so that the heirs would have something unchangeable to take hold of. What is written there is His, and the Spirit breathing on it while you read is His too.

So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.Hebrews 6:17-18

Two unchangeable things. Not one unchangeable thing and one nervous thing that depends on how your November goes.

And there is a second matter standing in that field, and it is the one that answers the distance. You were not brought into a legal arrangement. You were brought into a family, and the family was named before there was anybody in it to name: Ephesians 1:4-5 says He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world and marked us out for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ. Before the foundation. Before the notebook, before the scorch ring in the varnish, before your parents had met. A chair was set out for a son a long time before the notebook, and the word Father never once came up out of your own effort; His Spirit put it in your mouth.

So look at what a broken promise actually is inside an agreement like that. It is not a clause. You were never one of the two parties who walked the path, and what God swore by Himself is not dissolved by somebody who was not consulted when it was sworn. What happened in November was real. It was simply never load bearing.

Now the distance. Let me name it and then take it off you, because it is what you came in carrying. You have read the quiet as God stepping back from a man who could not be relied on. What is written is that He will never leave you nor forsake you, and His Spirit has been in that room the whole time you thought the room was empty. The quiet was not a verdict. It was an old man on a step with his hand on the latch, not opening it, staying there most of the night.