The Shop He Promised To Keep

He said it in a hospital corridor with a cup of tea going cold on the windowsill.

His father asked him, in the way a man asks a thing he has decided not to make into a scene, whether he would keep it going.

And he said yes.

That was the whole exchange. His father squeezed his hand once and said good, and then asked about the parking, because that is what men in that family do with a moment like that one.

He kept it going for eleven years. Four of those years were past the point where anybody sensible would have kept going, and he knows that, and he would do the four again.

In March the shutter came down and stayed down.

There is a phone repair place in it now. They are pleasant. He has been in twice for an entirely unnecessary screen protector.

Here is the part he has not said to anybody, including his wife.

He still walks past it. Not on the way to anywhere. He parks two streets over, on a Tuesday, and he stands across the road for about four minutes like a man waiting for somebody who is late, and then he goes home.

And what he stands there thinking is not about his father, and it is not grief exactly, and it took him most of a year to work out what it actually is.

It is a question, and the question is this. What happens to a promise when the thing it was about has stopped existing?

He gave his word. His word was about a shop. There is no shop.

He cannot find anywhere to put that. It sits in his chest like a key to a door that has been bricked up, and he has never once said it out loud because it sounds, when you say it, like a man making a fuss about a business.

If you gave your word about something that is not there any more, come in and sit down. There is far too much food and nobody is going to ask you what you are thinking.

What a promise is actually fastened to

There is a line in an odd corner of the Old Testament, spoken by a man who had been hired to say the opposite, and it is one of the plainest sentences about God in the whole book.

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?Numbers 23:19

Read what it is doing. It is setting God against every other party a person could ever make an agreement with.

Men die. Men change their minds. Men move county, lose interest, go under. A promise made between two men is only ever as durable as the shorter of the two lives in it, and everybody knows that and nobody says it out loud at the time.

And then this sentence puts somebody else in the room.

You are standing on a party to that promise who did not close in March. Numbers 23:19 sets God against every other party a man could swear in front of and says plainly that He does not repent of what He has spoken, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that line through a book where nearly everything visible fell over, which means the corridor in that hospital had three people in it and only one of them has gone.

Where the word actually went

Now let us be precise about what you did on that day, because precision is what is going to get you off the pavement across the road.

You did not make a promise to a building.

You made a promise to your father, about a shop, in front of God. Three things, and only one of them was the shop.

The shop was the subject of the sentence. It was never the ground the sentence stood on. A man does not swear on a business; he swears on who he is, and then he names a thing he will do about it.

You have a word that went past the shop into ground the shop never owned. Psalm 15:4 describes the man who sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not, and it is written as a description of somebody God welcomes rather than a rule He enforces, and it is the same Spirit who works that steadiness into a person, so the four unprofitable years were the promise being kept and not the promise being wasted.

Eleven years. Four of them past sense. That is not a promise that failed. That is a promise that was kept until the object of it stopped existing, which is the only way that particular promise could ever have ended.

What he actually asked you for

Here is the thing about that corridor that has been easy to look past, because the shop was always in the way of it.

He did not ask you to save a shop. A man dying in a hospital in his sixties knows exactly what a small business is worth and exactly how likely it is to survive him. He was not confused about that.

He asked his son whether he would carry the thing the shop was for.

You were asked to carry a family, and the shop was only ever the shape that carrying happened to have. Proverbs 13:22 says a good man leaveth an inheritance to his children's children, and it is written of something passed down through a house rather than through a premises, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept a family standing when the visible thing under it went, which means what he asked for on that day is still entirely available to be done.

You have been standing across a road grieving a promise you have not stopped keeping.