Stars Over an Empty Tent

The book bag is still on the peg by the front door. She packed it in September, reading record and water bottle and the pencil case with the broken zip, and it has hung there through autumn and Christmas and the whole of the wet spring, and she has not had the heart to take it down because taking it down would be a decision.

Every afternoon she goes to the gate anyway. She stands with the other mothers on the railings and the bell goes and the doors open and the children come out in that river they come out in, coats half on, shouting, and she watches them come and none of them is hers. Hers is at home on the sofa with the curtains half drawn, eleven years old, and has not been through that gate since the second week of term. Nobody did anything to her. It just closed over her, whatever it is, the way weather closes over a valley, and she cannot get out from under it, and neither can her mother.

The other mothers are kind. They ask, in the way people ask. And she says what she says, and she goes home past the peg with the bag on it.

She has a verse. Her own mother gave it to her years ago and she has said it over that girl since before she could walk: all your children shall be taught by the Lord, and great shall be the peace of your children. She still says it. She said it this morning over a sofa with a child on it who has not slept properly since October, and she heard how it sounded, and she stood at the gate that afternoon and thought the thing she has been trying not to think for eight months.

Everything in front of me says the opposite of what He said.

You know that gate. You have your own version of the peg. There is a promise you have carried a long time, and there is a piece of evidence hanging in the hall that contradicts it every time you walk past, and lately the evidence has been winning the argument, and you are tired of standing on the railings watching a river of somebody else's children.

He took him outside to count

Here is what God did with a man whose evidence had been contradicting the promise for a long time.

Abram was old. God had told him, years before, that he would be a father, and the years had gone past the way years do, and there was still no child in the tent, and Abram had started to work out how the promise could be true in some reduced way. A servant born in my house will inherit me, he said. He was not being faithless. He was doing what you do at the gate: adjusting the promise down until it fits the evidence.

And God did not argue with him about the tent. He did not explain the years. He took him outside.

And he brought him outside and said, Look toward heaven, and number the stars, if you are able to number them. Then he said to him, So shall your offspring be. And he believed the Lord, and he counted it to him as righteousness.Genesis 15:5-6

Look at what is in the frame. Above him, a sky he cannot count. Behind him, a tent with nobody in it. Both are true. Both are visible. God does not take one of them away, and the Spirit who kept this account leaves both in the frame. He stands the man between them and says which one is the promise.

You are standing between the same two things tonight, and the promise is still the sky. I am not saying that over you from my own hopefulness; Genesis 15 is where it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a covenant made to an old man in a field and stands it over your hall and your peg and your sofa. The evidence is real. It is not the verdict.

Both true, and only one sworn

I need to name the weight properly, because I have felt it and I know how it argues, and the Holy Spirit is not offended by its being said out loud.

Eight months of walking past the peg is not nothing. A year of the same phone call is not nothing. The evidence does not shout; that is what makes it heavy. It just hangs there, every day, in the same place, and every day it says quietly: He has changed His mind, or you heard wrong, or the promise was for other people, and here is the proof, in your own hallway. And you have got so tired of answering it that lately you have started to let it have the last word. Scripture knows that weight; Abram had done the same arithmetic in his tent.

Hear the order in Genesis 15, because the order is the whole thing. The tent was true first. The promise stood over it anyway. And then, in that same chapter, God did the thing that turns a promise into a covenant: He had Abram lay out the pieces, and when the sun went down and the dread came, God passed between them alone. Abram was asleep. He did not walk it. He did not hold up an end. God swore it to Himself, over a sleeping man and an empty tent, and a thing sworn like that is not adjusted by what is on the peg.

You are under a sworn word, not a hopeful one, and the sworn word does not shrink to fit your hallway. Paul says as much when he looks back at that night: Abram considered his own body, as good as dead, and did not weaken, because he was fully convinced that what God had promised, God was able to do (Romans 4:19-21). It is the Spirit of God who works that same conviction in a person, and He is at work in you now, at the railings, in the hall, wherever you are reading this.

What the promise does not do

Now the honest part, and I will not go past it.

The promise did not clear the tent that night. Abram walked back into it, and it was as empty as when he walked out. It stayed empty for a long time. Scripture does not tell him why, and it does not tell him that the empty years were secretly good for him, and it does not give him a date. It just refuses to let the tent be the verdict, and it goes on refusing, night after night, star after star, for as long as the evidence goes on arguing.

So I am not going to explain your eight months to you, or tell you what they are for, or promise you a morning when the bag comes down off the peg. Nobody handed me that, and a man who says a thing God did not say has left the country the promise came from. What I can tell you is what God has already done: He visited Sarah as He had said, and did for her as He had spoken. It happened, at the appointed time. That is on the record, and it is not there to tell you your date. It is there to tell you His word does not lose an argument with a tent.

You have a promise that has already been tested against far worse evidence than yours, and it is standing. That is the written record, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an old man's night in a field into ground under a mother at a gate. He does that. It is what He is for.