The Rope Holds Whether Or Not You Do

Four forty in the morning, and the snow is blue.

Six of them go up onto the snowfield in a line, strung out along one rope, their headlamps making six small yellow rooms in the dark. She is fourth. Her sister is second, and her sister is the entire reason she is here, having signed them both up in February for a guided crossing in July, back when July was still a theory.

Nobody tells her to hold the rope. It just seems obvious. The rope is the thing that keeps a person out of a crevasse, so a person holds the rope. She takes it in both fists at the first step and she does not put it down.

She holds it through the first hour, when there is nothing to see but the boots in front of her and nothing to hear but crampons biting and her own breathing.

She holds it through the second hour, when the sky behind the ridge goes the color of a peach and somebody up the line says something about the light, and she cannot answer, because she is concentrating.

She holds it through the third hour, when her forearms begin to burn from the inside and she starts bargaining with herself. To the next flag, then I switch hands. To the next flag.

By the fourth hour her fingers are not fingers any more. They are hooks. She could not open them if the mountain asked her nicely.

At nine o'clock the line stops at a spine of dark rock coming up out of the snow like the back of a whale, and everyone sits down, and the guide works his way along handing out water and dried apricots.

He reaches her, crouches, and looks at her hands.

"Open them," he says.

She tries. Nothing happens. He sets his bottle in the snow, takes her right hand in both of his, and works the fingers open one at a time, and it hurts, and she laughs, and then she is not laughing.

Then he reaches over and taps the aluminum carabiner at her hip. Twice, with one knuckle.

"This," he says.

She looks down at it. She has been wearing it for four hours and forty minutes and she has not looked at it once. The rope runs through the gate. The gate is a screw gate and it is screwed shut. Behind the gate is the belay loop, and the belay loop is sewn into the harness, and the harness is around her.

"I tied that at the trailhead," he says. "In the dark. Before you took one step. It has been holding you all morning, and it never once checked whether your hands were open or closed."

Then the sentence she takes home with her.

"Your hands were never for the rope. Your hands are for the axe, and the water, and the person behind you."

She sits on the whale's back of rock with her sore hands in her lap and looks out at eleven miles of white going gold, and her sister assumes she is crying about the view, and she lets her.

Your hands were never the attachment

Somebody handed you the rope and forgot to show you the knot.

That is all that has happened here. Not rebellion, not backsliding, not some secret failure nobody knows about. Somewhere between the day you first heard about Jesus and this morning, the good news arrived in your hands with a grip requirement quietly stapled to it, and you have been climbing ever since with both fists shut, and your forearms are on fire, and you are embarrassed about how tired you are, because tired was not supposed to be part of it.

So read what is written about who is holding whom, and let His Spirit say it to you rather than about you.

And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand. My Father, which gave them me, is greater than all; and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father's hand.John 10:28-29

Count the hands in that sentence. There are two, and neither one of them is yours.

You are held in a hand you did not climb into, and you were put there by another hand that is greater than all. That is not a generous reading of the verse, it is what John 10 says in plain words, and the same Spirit who moved a fisherman to set it down is in the room with you while you look at it.

Now look at what is missing from those two lines. There is no clause about your consistency. No footnote about your worst week. He does not say they shall never perish provided their grip holds, and there is no version of that sentence anywhere in Scripture where the safety of the sheep rests on the strength of the sheep.

Which brings us to the word covenant, and to why it is not another word for contract.

A contract is two parties agreeing to perform, and if one fails to perform, the thing is void. That is the arrangement most people are quietly living inside, and it is exactly why the exhaustion has been passing for faithfulness.

A covenant in Scripture is cut, not signed. Blood is in it, said plainly and without drama, and the blood in this one is Christ's own, given once. More than that, the covenant you stand inside was sworn as an oath. God bound Himself by Himself, because there was nobody greater to swear by. Hebrews 6 says that in as many words, and it says the reason was so that the heirs of the promise would have strong consolation.

Strong consolation. That is the phrase. Not strong performance.

So the tiredness in your hands has no right to stay there. It is not the price of following Jesus, it is the price of a job that was never assigned to you, and His word says the oath was sworn long before you existed to weaken it. His Spirit is not standing over you counting your fingers.

And this is where the whole thing lands, because covenant is not first a legal word. It is a family word.

You were written into a household before that household had anybody in it. Ephesians 1 says you were chosen before the foundation of the world and marked out beforehand for adoption, and the Spirit of promise is named right there as the seal on it. Adopted children do not renew their adoption every January. A person who has been brought into a family carries an entirely different problem from a person auditioning for one, and the distance between those two is the distance to your peace.