The Appointment You Go To Alone

The card had been folded into eighths, which is four folds more than a card that size needs.

She had done it on the bus the first time and it had become a thing her hands did. Out of the coat pocket, open, read the time she already knew, fold, fold, fold, back in the pocket. Eleven forty. Second floor. Bring this card with you.

The bus was almost empty at that hour. A man asleep near the front with his chin on his coat. Two students at the back who had not stopped laughing since the roundabout. Outside the window, shop shutters going up, a boy hosing down a step, the light coming in low and honey colored across the seat beside her.

The seat beside her was the problem.

There had been a time when the seat beside her was never empty for a thing like this. Her sister used to come and bring boiled sweets and talk over the top of the nerves. Then her sister moved two hundred miles for work. Her neighbor came the year after that and was wonderful about it, and then her neighbor got ill herself, and asking her now would be a cruelty. There is a friend she could still ring, and she has picked up the phone twice, and both times she has put it down, because the friend has three children and a job that starts at seven, and there is a certain kind of person who would rather sit alone than be somebody's extra weight.

So she counts the stops. Sixteen of them. She knows all sixteen.

You know this bus. Maybe yours is a car park where you sit with the engine off for four minutes before you go in. Maybe it is a corridor with chairs bolted to the wall, or a phone call you take standing up in the kitchen because sitting down would make it real. The details are yours. The arithmetic is the same one she was doing: going down the list of people, and reaching the end of the list, and going in anyway.

And nobody at that appointment will ever know. You will be pleasant. You will say thank you at the desk. The lift will still smell of disinfectant and somebody will hold the door, and none of them will have the faintest idea that you arrived at that building having run out of people.

That arithmetic is the thing this message is coming for. Not the appointment. The arithmetic.

What the old oath actually did to a person's strength

Two households swear an oath. Bread torn, salt eaten, words said in front of witnesses under a low sun. And among the things they say to each other is a sentence that sounds extravagant until you watch it operate: what is mine is yours, and my strength stands in front of your house.

Watch it operate. Four winters later one of those two houses is in trouble. A debt has landed on them that they cannot carry, and the whole district knows it. So the men of that house go to the other family, and here is the thing you must not miss: they do not go as beggars. They do not make a case. There is no explaining of circumstances, no proving of need, no working out whether they deserve the help.

They go because there was an oath, and the oath had already decided this. And the other household pays, and pays without discussion, because in a covenant the stronger party's strength is not a favor available on application. It has already been assigned.

Now put your bus seat next to that. You have been doing the arithmetic of a person with no covenant, counting names, weighing whether you are worth somebody's Tuesday morning. That is not the maths of your actual situation: what is written in Isaiah 41:13 is God taking hold of a hand, and the Holy Spirit is not describing that grip to you at this moment, He is closing it.

The hand, and which hand it is

For I, the LORD your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, Fear not, I am the one who helps you.Isaiah 41:13

Notice which hand. Not an arm around the shoulders, which is comfort. The right hand, which in every one of those old towns was the working hand, the carrying hand, the hand you put out first when you walked into a room where you did not know how it would go.

A covenant partner took that hand and walked on that side of you, and it meant something specific and public. It meant the matter in front of you had stopped being a matter you were carrying by yourself. Everybody who saw the two of you on the road understood the arrangement without a word being said.

You are held on that side right now, and you were held on the bus last time, in the four minutes with the engine off, in the corridor with the bolted chairs. I am not offering you a warm thought to take in with you. Scripture puts God's own hand around a hand, and His Spirit is the One making that ancient sentence land on you as your own situation rather than as somebody else's poetry.

And I will not tell you how the appointment goes. Nobody honest will. What a covenant settles is not the outcome. It is the company, and the strength standing in the matter, and those two are settled whichever way the morning goes.

That is the difference between a promise about results and an oath about persons. The oath is about Him being in it with you. What He does inside it is His to decide, and He has never once been in a room He could not handle.