The Other End Of Your Word

He is standing in his own driveway at ten past five with the van keys in his hand, and he has nowhere to take the van.

This is the fourth morning in a row. He wakes at four fifty without an alarm, the way he has since he was twenty three, and he lies there for a bit, and then he gets up because lying there is worse. He makes the flask. He puts his boots on at the back door. And then he comes out and stands next to a van with a dead man's name painted along the side of it, and the sky goes from black to gray over the top of the houses opposite, and he does not get in.

The firm shut two years ago. Not badly, nobody did anything wrong, it just got old and small and then it got smaller and then one day there was a last invoice and that was that. The name is still on the van because taking it off felt like something he was not willing to do with a scraper on a Saturday.

Ray gave him his first work at nineteen. Taught him everything. And in the second week of a bad winter, at a kitchen table with the fan heater going, sat him down and asked him, straight, no drama, to look after two things. The work. And Marilyn, if it came to it.

He said yes. He meant it in his bones. He has never once wobbled on it in twenty six years.

Ray has been dead three years. The work is gone. And Marilyn is at her daughter's in another county now, and she is happy, and her daughter is marvelous, and she rings him at Christmas and tells him he sounds tired, and there is not one thing on this earth she needs from him.

So here is what he cannot get out of his head, standing in the drive with the keys.

Every part of the promise has gone. The man he made it to is in the ground. The thing he made it about does not exist. The person he was meant to look after is being looked after beautifully by somebody else. There is nobody left anywhere who could hold him to a single word of it, and no way left to keep it even if there were.

And he is still getting up at ten to five.

Which he cannot decide about. Some mornings he thinks it means he is faithful. Most mornings, lately, he thinks it means he is a man who cannot put down a habit, standing in a driveway in the dark next to a van with a name on it, keeping a promise to nobody, and he does not know which of those he is and it is starting to frighten him.

Where a promise actually goes

There was a year when a whole body of ministers woke up and found that the oath they had all sworn pointed at something that no longer existed in relation to them. Nobody had broken it. Nothing had been betrayed by anybody. The other end of it had simply gone, in the space of a few years, and they were left holding a vow made in complete good faith with nothing at the other end of the rope.

What they discovered, and it took them a while and it was not comfortable, is that the vow had never actually been horizontal.

Look at what the letter to the Hebrews says about how an oath works, because it is the plainest sentence in Scripture about the mechanics of a promise, and almost nobody has ever heard it read out.

For human beings swear by what is greater than themselves, and in all their disputes an oath given as confirmation is an end of all contradiction. So when God wanted to show even more clearly to the heirs of the promise how unchangeable His purpose was, 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 shelter would have strong encouragement to take hold of the hope set before us. We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, secure and firm, entering into the inner place behind the curtain.Hebrews 6, verses 16 to 19

Human beings swear by what is greater than themselves.

That is not a religious flourish. That is a description of what your mouth did at that kitchen table. You did not hand your word across to a man. You sent it up, past him, to the only thing there is that is greater than both of you, and he heard it on the way. He was a witness. He was never the other end.

You have been grieving as though the anchor was tied to Ray, and it never was. Hebrews 6:19 calls this hope an anchor of the soul entering into that within the veil, and it is the Holy Spirit who put the anchor inside rather than ashore, which means the rope went past that man into ground he did not own and could not take with him.

And notice where the letter puts the anchor. Not down. In. It goes inside, behind the curtain, into the one room in the universe that is not subject to closures, funerals, downturns, county moves, or last invoices. An anchor is not thrown at the shore. It is thrown into water nobody can see, into ground nobody has laid eyes on, and it holds because of what is down there, not because of what shows from the deck.

So the question that has been frightening you in the driveway is the wrong question.

You have been asking whether you are faithful or just stuck, and both are answers to a question that was never the right one. Hebrews 6:18 says it is impossible for God to lie and puts the promise on two unchangeable things rather than on any witness to it, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with your spirit, which means the promise was never standing on the man. God, when He wanted to make a promise, could find nobody greater to swear by, so He swore by Himself, which is the only oath in existence that cannot lose its other party. And you swore in front of a man, to the same One, and He has not gone anywhere, and He was there in the kitchen with the fan heater going, and He is in the driveway now.

You are not keeping a promise to nobody, and you have never once been doing that. Hebrews 6:17 says God confirmed it by an oath to show the immutability of His counsel, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that written to people who had fled for refuge, which means the other end of the rope has been held the entire three years.