Kept It Till March

The chair beside the bed was the molded plastic kind, and by the second week he had learned which way to sit in it so his back would hold out until two in the morning.

His father was in that bed. February, the long part of February, the stretch where the days do not appear to be going anywhere. And on the ninth, at some hour with no traffic outside, he said something to God that he had not planned and had never said before in his life. He said: I am going to do this properly from now on. A chapter every night. And the table, out loud, with the kids, every night, the way it was done when I was a boy.

It was not a bargain. He was too tired to bargain and he knew better anyway. It was a man in a plastic chair deciding to stop being a spectator.

And here is the part he never tells anybody, because it is the part that makes it worse.

He did it.

He did it that night and the next. He read the chapter in the corridor when he could not get home. He came in at half past midnight and read it standing up at the counter with his coat still on. When his father came home he read it at the kitchen table, and he prayed out loud with three children who did not know what to do with their hands at first and then got used to it, and by the second week the smallest one had started asking to say it herself.

Thirty-three nights.

The fourteenth of March was a Friday and there was a call-out on a line that went down in the wind, and he got in at ten past two and slept in his boots on the couch. Nobody said anything about it. Saturday there were people in the house. Sunday he thought about it around eleven and thought, tomorrow, and meant it.

He could not tell you today when it actually stopped. There was no last night. It thinned out the way a track through a field thins out, and by the end of April the book was back on the shelf sideways where it had been for eleven years.

That was a while ago now.

And this is what he carries. He has not prayed since. Not properly, not the way he did in the chair. Because the first thing he would have to do is account for it. He has run the conversation in his head in the truck a hundred times and every version starts with an explanation and every explanation sounds like a man in a doorway who does not believe himself.

So he does not start. He drives past the church on the way to the yard twice a day and does not go in, and he is not angry at God, and he could not tell you the last time he heard from Him.

You have been in that truck.

God says out loud what He is doing this for

There is a moment in Ezekiel where God tells a people, in advance and in plain words, exactly what the grounds are for what He is about to do for them. And He does it because He knows they will get it wrong.

Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord GOD; I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name's sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen, whither ye went.Ezekiel 36:22

Sit in that for a second, because it is not the sentence you would write for Him.

He is about to gather them, wash them, give them a new heart, take out the stone one, and put His own Spirit inside them. And before He does any of it He stops and removes them from the credit line. Not for your sakes. He is not doing it because they held on. He is not doing it because their run was long enough. He states the grounds so that nobody standing in the middle of that mercy could ever conclude it arrived on the strength of their record, because a mercy you think you earned is a mercy you can lose, and He would not have them living like that.

Now hear this over you and not merely at you. You are being kept by the One who had it written down whose name the keeping is done for, and the Holy Spirit is in you as the proof of it, put there by the same God who said the new heart was His idea and not yours.

Something got broken in March, and it was not the covenant

Here is the distinction I want you to build on, because the whole load sits on it.

You broke a habit. You did not break the covenant. You could not have broken the covenant, and neither could I, on the best month either of us ever had or the worst, because it was never a two-signature document with a performance clause in the middle. God swore it. God rests it on His own name. Scripture says He confirmed it by an oath, and an oath is a thing the swearer carries.

Thirty-three nights was good. It was genuinely good. What it was not, at any point, was the thing holding you.

And I will say the other half of it once and plainly, because you would smell it if I left it out: what you do still matters. That table mattered. The smallest one asking to say it herself mattered, and it will matter again. But the value of that table never came from the run being unbroken, and going back to it is not a repair job on a record. It is a man sitting down at a good thing because it is good.

You are kept by Him at this hour, in the truck, on the road past the church, with the book still sideways on the shelf. Ezekiel 36:27 has God putting His Spirit within His people as His own doing, and that Spirit has not been idle in you for one day of the silence.