The Thing I Said I Would Do

The gate has a hinge that drops, and you have to lift it, and she knows exactly how to lift it because she has been through it a hundred times over eleven years.

She has not been through it since the end of June.

It was a small thing. It genuinely was. Her neighbor, who is eighty one and has good days and less good ones, was struggling with a form, and there was a phone call that needed making and a bit of it that needed to be done online, and she said, leave it with me, I will sort it out for you.

She meant it entirely. She would have done it that evening if the evening had been a normal evening.

It was not a normal evening, and then the following week was the thing at work, and then it was the school holidays, and now it is seven weeks later and the form is in a drawer in the kitchen under the takeaway menus, and she thinks about it perhaps four times a day.

Yesterday she saw the neighbor at the far end of the road with her shopping trolley, and she crossed over. She crossed the road. She has been going up the other side for about a fortnight now, and she tells herself it is because of the parked cars.

Here is the arithmetic that has her stuck. Going round now means saying it has been seven weeks. Seven weeks needs an explanation, and every explanation she has sounds like an excuse, and she cannot bring herself to stand at that gate offering excuses to a woman of eighty one who has waited politely.

So the form stays in the drawer, and the road stays crossed, and the eleven years of that gate sit there getting quietly damaged by something neither of them would call a problem out loud.

You know that road. Yours might be a phone call you said you would make, a thing you said you would look into, a lift you offered in April. What you owe is not money. It is a sentence and about twenty minutes, and it has somehow become heavier than either.

Come and stand by the wall a minute before you go. There is an old line about promises that gets used as a threat, and it is not one.

There is no code, and there is a today

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I would rather lose you now than keep you here hoping for one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that makes seven weeks not have happened, and nothing here is a technique for feeling better without doing anything. And I want to be careful with you, because this category can be preached in a way that flattens people: nothing in this is calling you unreliable. You are a woman who has kept a hundred promises through that gate over eleven years, and one form in a drawer does not overwrite that.

Here is the line.

When thou vowest a vow unto God, defer not to pay it; for he hath no pleasure in fools: pay that which thou hast vowed. Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay.Ecclesiastes 5:4-5

It sounds severe. Read who it is protecting.

Somebody said a thing, and somebody else is now living inside the expectation of it. The whole weight of that passage is on the gap between a sentence and a life that has arranged itself around the sentence. God is not fussing about vocabulary. He is guarding the person who is waiting, because waiting on somebody who said they would is a specific and lonely condition, and He knows it.

Your neighbor is eighty one. She has a form she cannot do. And for seven weeks she has been not chasing you, which for a woman of that generation is a whole discipline, and every day she has been slightly rearranging her expectations around a sentence you said in a doorway in June.

That is what is actually happening, and it has nothing to do with whether you are a good person.

You are not being weighed here, and the thing being guarded in that passage is her waiting rather than your character. That is not a soft reading I have invented to be gentle with you. It is what the written passage is about, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes an old proverb and lays it across a garden gate with a hinge that drops.

You have a God who has never once required an explanation before He would let you come back. Scripture is full of people arriving late with nothing prepared and being received without a word about the delay, and His Spirit is the one who takes that pattern and makes it usable at a gate this afternoon.

Now let me name the true thing, since we are standing here.

The crossing of the road is not about the form. It is that at some point in the last fortnight this stopped being a task and became a verdict. You have decided that going round now says something about the kind of neighbor you are, and rather than hear that said out loud, you have been walking up the other side.

And she, meanwhile, is not holding a verdict. She is holding a form.

You are not the woman who lets an old lady down, and seven weeks is a fact about a diary rather than a description of a heart. Scripture says His compassions fail not, they are new every morning, and new every morning is a phrase about a fresh page rather than an accumulating one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a body standing on the wrong side of a road.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a gate does not get opened because somebody was kind about your reasons. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what intending never does. So say it out loud, here, before you go. You have the standing to tell a verdict what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that your position rather than your reliability, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a garden wall.