The Office With Nobody In It

He said the words to the office and not to the man sitting in it, and at the time that seemed like the most careful thing about the whole arrangement.

That is what makes a thing a covenant rather than a friendship. It outlives whoever happens to be in the chair. The man in the seat when he swore was a decent enough person and he liked him well enough, and none of that was the point, and both of them knew it and both of them would have said so.

It was elegant. He has always been pleased with how carefully it was done.

The seat has been empty for three years.

Nobody has been appointed. There is no process running. It is not a scandal and it is not a crisis; it is the ordinary quiet way these things happen, where a thing stops being filled and nobody quite announces it and after a while everyone has adjusted.

He has gone on keeping every clause.

All of them. Including the two nobody would ever check. Including the one that costs him about six days a year and that he could drop without any human being on earth noticing.

Here is the question he has carried for three years and never once put to another person.

Does it still bind?

And the reason he has never asked is almost funny, and he has never found it funny. The person you would ask, about whether an obligation to an office still stands, is the person in the office.

There is nobody in the office.

So the question sits there, and he keeps the clauses, and he has begun to notice that he cannot tell any more whether he is a man of his word or a man performing a ritual at an empty chair.

If you have been reporting to something that has nobody in it, pull up a chair. The coffee is good and nobody here is going to ask you what the clauses are.

The covenant nobody is holding up at your end

There is a line in the Psalms where God says something about His own covenant, and the striking thing is who is doing the keeping in the sentence.

My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.Psalm 89:34

Every verb is His. He will not break. He will not alter. The thing that has gone out of His lips stays exactly as it went out.

And read the verse before it, because that is where this gets uncomfortable in the good way. He is saying this about a people who had broken their side of it comprehensively. The covenant in question was not being upheld at the human end at all, and He states plainly that His end does not move as a result.

That is not a covenant between two parties who each hold half. It is a covenant one party holds, and invites the other into.

You are inside an agreement that is being held up entirely from the other end. Psalm 89:34 has God saying He will not break or alter what has gone out of His own lips, spoken over people who had already failed at their side, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that as a statement about His nature rather than about anybody's performance, which means the binding you have been trying to verify was never dependent on somebody occupying a chair.

What an office actually was

Now let us be exact about the careful thing you did, because the care was right and it has been slightly misunderstood since.

Swearing to an office rather than to a man was correct. It is what makes an undertaking survive a person's departure, and it is why your arrangement outlived a decent man moving on, which was the entire point of doing it that way.

But an office is a place where authority sits. It is not the source of the authority. A chair does not generate anything. It holds somebody who is holding something from further up.

You have been keeping a covenant whose authority never originated in the room you swore it in. Romans 13:1 says there is no power but of God, and the powers that be are ordained of God, and it puts every office downstream of Him rather than beside Him, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Spirit of truth, which means an empty chair interrupts a chain of custody and does not touch the source.

Ritual at an empty chair, examined

Here is the accusation that has been quietly running for three years, and it should be looked at properly: that all of this is a ritual performed at an empty chair. A ritual performed at nothing is a sad thing and it is worth being afraid of. But look at what you have actually been doing. You have been keeping clauses. Six days a year of real cost. Two that nobody could check.

You were doing the thing itself rather than performing the appearance of it, and no audience has been required for three years. Matthew 6:6 says pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly, and it is written of the practice that continues where nobody is watching rather than of the practice that needs a room, and it is the Holy Spirit who meets a person in exactly that place.

A man who keeps the unverifiable clauses is not performing. Performance is precisely the thing that stops when the audience leaves.