The Day You Held the Rope

The steel is lying in the side passage on two lengths of timber and it has been there since Monday, and every time he walks past it he does the sum again.

His sister's kitchen. Her opening, her wall coming out, and him, because it has always been him. Twenty years of being the one who does the lifting, in that family and in every other part of his life, and he has got so used to it that he no longer notices himself doing the arithmetic. What can I carry. What can I reach. What can I manage before Sunday.

This time the arithmetic does not come out. He has a scaffold pole, an idea involving three lengths of timber and a car jack, and a genuine plan to do it on his own on Saturday because there is nobody to ask, and the not asking is not pride, it is simply that after twenty years the asking muscle has gone.

Thursday morning a flatbed pulls up outside with a small crane folded on the back of it, and a man in a hard hat says his old boss had heard, and where do they want it.

Eleven minutes. That is how long it takes. The arm swings out over the fence, the strop goes on, the steel comes off the timbers as if it were a length of curtain rail, and he is standing in the middle of his sister's ruined lawn holding the tag line with two fingers, doing nothing whatsoever, watching a beam he could not have moved with his whole body go exactly where it needed to go.

You know this garden. Maybe your steel is a diagnosis, or a letter, or an eighteen-year-old you cannot reach, or a Tuesday you have been dreading since March. And maybe you have got so used to being your own entire capacity that you have stopped noticing you are doing it.

Everything in a covenant is an exchange of what each one has

Here is the scene the Bible keeps showing and hardly ever explains, because everybody watching already understood it.

Two parties stand together and swear an oath. From that moment the accounts merge. His enemies are your enemies. Your debts are his debts. His strength is available to you the way it is available to him, and yours to him, and neither of you is any longer a single person facing anything.

That is not friendship with a nice word attached. It is a change in who is standing where. Afterwards, if somebody comes at the weaker of the two, they have not come at the weaker of the two. They have come at both, and the stronger one is the one who answers.

Now hear the oath the whole Bible is built on, said to a childless man in the dark who had just refused a king's goods and had nothing on his side of the ledger at all.

Fear not, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.Genesis 15:1

Not I will send you a shield. Not I will teach you to shield yourself. I am your shield. The strength of the other party, named, in the first person, standing in the place where the blow would land.

You are inside that same covenant and the strength on your side of it is God's own, not a topped up version of yours. That is written into an oath sworn long before anybody thought to ask whether you were up to your week, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient oath a present arrangement rather than a piece of history. Nothing about it waits on your capacity.

What is underneath is not you

There is a line at the end of Deuteronomy, in Moses' last blessing over people who were about to walk into everything they were afraid of.

The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.Deuteronomy 33:27

Underneath. It is a structural word and he chose it. Not around you, not beside you, not cheering. Underneath, where the load actually goes.

And here is what that means on a Thursday morning in a wrecked garden. The arms were already there on Monday, while the steel sat on the timbers and he did his sums. They were there in the years when he lifted everything himself and thought the lifting was what was holding it up. Nothing changed on Thursday except that he found out.

You have been held from underneath the whole time, and you were held during the twenty years when you believed the whole weight was on your arms. Scripture puts the arms under a people who had not yet crossed anything, and the Spirit of God is how a promise made at the edge of a river reaches a man standing in his sister's garden. The arms did not arrive when you noticed them.

Say plainly what this does not mean, because a reader deserves it said. It does not mean the beam goes where you wanted. It does not mean the letter says what you hoped, or the Tuesday goes well, or the eighteen-year-old rings. God is not a guaranteed outcome and He never offered to be one. What He offered was Himself, in front of the thing and underneath it, and the difference between facing your week with that and facing it without is not a small difference. It is the whole difference.

The tag line is a real job

Do not miss the two fingers on the rope, because a covenant never turns the weaker party into furniture.

The tag line steadies the load. It stops a swing. It is a genuine task and the crane driver wants somebody on it, and the man holding it is doing something real and something small, and both of those words matter. He is not lifting the beam. He never was going to lift the beam. He is doing the thing that is actually his, at the size it actually is.

That is what the covenant asks of you: your part, at its own size, which is almost never the size you have been trying to make it.

You have a real part in this and it is not the load bearing part, and being small in it is not being useless in it. The written word says His strength is made perfect in weakness, and His Spirit is the one who makes a two fingered job feel like enough instead of like a demotion. Your hands are not the rating on this lift.