The Promise You Kept Renegotiating

Mateo made a promise to his wife in the second year of their marriage, and he has kept it every year, one year later.

The promise was specific. It had a shape and it had a season attached to it, and he made it standing in a kitchen with his coat still on, and he meant every word, and she knew he meant it, which is why she has never once brought it up as a grievance.

He is not a man who breaks promises. That is not the story here. He has kept every other promise he has ever made to that woman, including two that cost him a great deal, and if you asked her she would tell you so before you had finished the question.

What happened to this one is different, and it is worse in a quieter way.

Every year, somewhere around the season it was meant to happen in, he has moved it. Not out of the diary. Not canceled, not abandoned, not even really postponed in any way that required a conversation. He has moved it by one year, in his own head, on the reasonable grounds that this particular year is not the year.

And he has been right every time. That is the part that should stop us.

The year of the move was not the year. The year his mother was ill was not the year. The year the work went strange, the year of the school, the year everything cost more than it should have. Line them all up and every single one of those decisions was correct, and any reasonable man would have made them, and I would have made most of them myself.

Nine of them.

He worked it out at a wedding, sitting at the end of a table watching a young couple do what young couples do, and he did the arithmetic in his head and got nine and put his glass down.

Nobody had renegotiated anything with him. There was never a meeting. There was never a moment where two people sat down and agreed to a new date, because a promise moved by one year is never a broken promise, it is a promise with a small adjustment, and a small adjustment does not require anybody's consent.

Nine small adjustments do not either. That is the whole trick of it.

Now hear me, because a man reading this is already reaching for the whip and I am taking it off him.

Mateo did not lie to his wife in that kitchen. He is not a fraud and he is not weak and he has not wasted nine years, and the things he chose instead were good things that a good man chooses. Nobody in that family went without because of a single one of those decisions.

That is what makes this the small sale rather than the dramatic one.

A promise that is always kept next year is never once broken, and is never once kept.

You have your own version. There is something you said, out loud, to somebody who loves you, with a season attached to it, and the season has arrived several times, and each time there was a genuinely good reason, and there is a number attached to it now and you already know roughly what the number is.

Nobody is calling you a liar. Nothing here is an accusation.

But something was traded, and what it bought was a year of not having to rearrange anything.

The plainest sentence He ever gave about speech

There is a line of His about promises and it is startlingly short.

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.Matthew 5:37

He is not banning oaths in order to be strict. Read what He is actually doing: He is dismantling the whole apparatus of levels and qualifications and small print that people build around their word, and He is saying that a person in the kingdom does not need one, because their yes is already load bearing.

Which means He assumed something remarkable about you. He assumed a yes could stand up on its own without scaffolding.

And now hear what is already true. You are the kind of person whose yes can hold weight. That is not my encouragement, it is what the written word assumes about anybody in Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a man sitting at the end of a table at a wedding with his glass down.

And the promise has not died. It has been moved, not buried: the word says God is faithful, He cannot deny Himself, and it is His Spirit who has kept that particular sentence alive in you for nine years so that it could be counted at a wedding rather than forgotten at one.

That is not an accident. A dead promise does not make a man put his glass down.

What is not being asked of you

Now I am going to be careful, because this is exactly the paragraph where a message like this starts spending a family's money and a family's peace.

Nobody here is telling you to do the thing this year. I am not going to name a date for you and I am not going to tell you it must be soon, because I do not know your household. I do not know what is stretched, who is unwell, what the year actually holds. A message that costs a real family something real, written by somebody who will never meet them, is not ministry.

I am not going to tell you what it should cost, either. Not a figure, not a proportion, not one word about how it should be arranged. That is not mine to say and it never will be.

And I am not going to tell you those nine years were stolen from anybody. They were not. They were spent on a wife, on a mother, on children, on a household, and God saw every one of them.

So hear what is not required. You do not have to make it up to anybody. Nothing in Scripture puts a man on a repayment plan with his own family, and the Spirit of God has never once dealt with a son that way.

And you are not behind. He restores the years the locusts ate, says the written word, and the Spirit is entirely capable of making a thing done in the tenth year better than it would have been in the first, because the man doing it is not the man who made the promise, and that is a gain and not a loss.