Only One Walked Between the Pieces

The wire has to be stretched before it is stapled, and his hands know how to do it without him.

He has been on this fence line since first light with his father-in-law, working the way they always have, the older man setting posts and him coming behind with the wire and the strainer, neither of them saying much because there is nothing that needs saying between two men who have done this every spring for eleven years. The dog is asleep under the truck. The hill drops away to the road and the road drops away to the town where the job used to be.

At midday the old man lets down the tailgate, unscrews the thermos, hands him the cup, and bows his head. He does not ask. He never asks. He has bowed his head over every tailgate lunch for eleven springs and every one of those springs his son-in-law has said the grace, because he was the one who could, the one who led the table at home and read to the children and prayed with a hand on his wife's back when the second baby came early. That was who he was. The old man is simply waiting for him to be it.

And he cannot. He has not prayed out loud in eight months. Not since the letter, and the weeks after the letter, and the Sunday he stopped going and told himself it was one Sunday. He has not opened the Bible on the kitchen windowsill. He has not led anything. And it comes to him now with a hot cup in his hand and an old man's head bowed beside him that he has not held up his end of anything in a long time, and that whatever God swore to him once must surely have gone the way of the things he swore back.

You know the bowed head beside you, and the cup going cold in your hand. You know the eight months, whatever your number is. And you know the sentence underneath it, because it is the reason the grace will not come: I stopped keeping my side, so He is not bound to keep His.

What He swore, and who was awake when He swore it

Let me name the weight properly, because it is a heavy one and it does not lift by being told it is light. It is not that God is angry; that is not what worries you. What worries you is that the arrangement is over. That the promises were a two-sided thing, and your side has lain in the grass for so long that His side has quietly lapsed, and nobody sent a letter because nobody needed to. It is not fear of punishment. It is the sense of a door that has closed by itself.

Here is what Paul wrote to a young man from a prison, near the end, when he had every reason to be counting up who had let him down.

If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Read where the weight sits in that sentence. Not on us. The if is ours: if we are faithless, and Paul does not soften it, he says the word. But the remains is His, and the reason for the remains is not our recovery, or our getting back to the windowsill Bible, or a good spring. The reason is that He cannot deny Himself. His faithfulness is not a response to ours. It is a fact about who He is, and He does not stop being who He is because a man on a tailgate has gone quiet for eight months.

You are held by a faithfulness that does not take its cue from yours. I am not saying that as a comfort I made up on the way here. It is written, and it is written by a man who watched people leave him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that verse more than a nice thought when you are the faithless one it names.

Now here is the thing that actually happened, and it is not a picture. It is on the page.

The night Abram slept through his own covenant

In Genesis 15 God swore a covenant to Abram, and the way it was sworn in that world was this: animals were cut in two, the halves were laid opposite each other, and the parties to the covenant walked between the pieces together, both of them, as if to say, let it be done to me as to these if I break my word. It was a two-sided walk. Both parties, between the halves, on their own feet.

That is not what happened.

Scripture records that as the sun went down a deep sleep fell on Abram, and a dread and great darkness with it, and while he lay there unable to lift a hand, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between the pieces. Alone. God walked the covenant path by Himself while the man it was sworn to slept in the dark. Abram did not hold up his end that night. He could not. He was not conscious. And the covenant was cut anyway, and it stood, and it stands.

You were never the one holding this up. That is not a softening of what you have done or left undone in eight months, and I will come to that. It is simply the record. The Spirit of God is the one who carried the fire between the pieces, and Genesis 15:17 says only one walked, and it was not the man.

What your end is, then

I said I would come to it, so here it is, and I will not slide past it because you have not been asked to stop caring. What you have let lie in the grass matters. The windowsill Bible matters. The tailgate grace matters. Not because the covenant is waiting on them, but because they are how a kept man lives, and a kept man who stops living like it is not un-kept, he is only miserable, and you know that because you have been miserable. Your end is not the load-bearing wall of the house. It is you living in the house. And you can walk back into it this afternoon, and nothing about the walls will have moved.

You have a covenant that was walked for you, and you have a life to walk inside it, and those are two different things. Scripture holds them apart on purpose: He cannot deny Himself, and we are still called to be faithful, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man off the tailgate and back to the windowsill without ever once telling him the fire had gone out while he was away.