The Letter You Have To Answer

It has been leaning against the fruit bowl for nine days.

She has moved it four times to wipe the table and put it back in the same place each time, propped at the same angle, because putting it in a drawer would be a lie and putting it in the bin would be a different kind of lie. She has read it three times. She knows exactly what it says and exactly what it wants: a reply, by Friday, with a decision in it that only she can make.

Nine days. Bananas have gone brown next to it. A birthday card came and went. Twice she has sat down at that table with a pen and a clean sheet, and both times she got as far as the date and then went and put the washing on instead.

It is not the letter. She has answered harder letters than that one. It is that there is nobody in the house to say the word we.

That is the whole thing, and if you have one of these on your own table you already know it. Somebody who has a person, anyone, a husband, a sister, a friend who will sit down opposite and say right, let us look at this, answers it on day two. Not because the second person knows anything. Because the weight of a hard thing halves the instant somebody else is under it with you, and a weight that never halves does not get lighter with time. It just sits by the fruit bowl.

So come and stand on a hillside a very long way from your kitchen.

Two young men on a slope, one of them a prince, the son of a king, dressed like it. The other has come in from the sheep and smells of it, and he has just done something enormous and is about to become extremely inconvenient to the prince's entire future.

And the prince takes off his robe.

Not a gesture. He takes the robe off his own back and hands it over. Then his tunic. Then his belt. Then his sword and his bow, everything on him that says who he is and everything on him that says what he can do, and he puts all of it into the hands of a shepherd who owns nothing, and the two of them stand there, one dressed as a prince and one dressed as whatever a shepherd is.

Nothing was traded. Nobody negotiated. One man simply put everything that was his behind another man, permanently and out loud, in front of witnesses, and from that afternoon on, anybody coming at the shepherd was coming at the house of the king.

That happened. On a hillside, with hands, between two people.

What the robe was actually saying

Look at what the shepherd walked away with. Not a present. A robe that everyone in that country could identify at two hundred paces, and a belt, and the prince's own weapons. He walked down that hill carrying the visible strength of somebody else, and every person who saw him coming had to do a calculation they had not had to do that morning.

That is the shape of the thing. In a covenant, one party's strength becomes the other party's strength, and it does not stay a sentiment about friendship. It is transferred. It shows. It changes who has to be reckoned with when you walk into a room.

Now go and stand in a courtyard a few generations later, because a king is about to do the bravest thing in the story and it does not look brave at all.

A report has come in. Something enormous is on its way toward his country and he cannot stop it, and he has the whole nation standing in the courtyard watching him, women and small children at the front. And he does not give a speech. He stands up in front of all of them and says out loud that he has no strength, that he does not know what to do, and that his eyes are on God. A king said that. Out loud. In public.

And into that silence, the answer comes back.

Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great multitude; for the battle is not yours, but God's.2 Chronicles 20:15

Right now, as you read, you are inside that arrangement, and you were inside it before this week's letter ever landed on your table. I am not warming you up with an idea. 2 Chronicles 20:15 says the matter belongs to God and not to the one who has to face it, and the Holy Spirit is at work in you this minute taking a sentence spoken in an ancient courtyard and standing it in front of the thing propped against your fruit bowl.

What changes, and what does not

Be careful here, because this is where an honest article and a comforting one part company.

The word to the king did not say the trouble was canceled. It did not say the week would be easy, or that the letter would answer itself, or that anybody would enjoy Friday. It said something narrower and far better: the matter is not yours. The people still had to get up in the morning and walk out to the place. Nothing was removed from the diary. What changed was who was standing in front of it.

So you have a covenant strength standing between you and that envelope, and you have it today, not at the end of a better week. That is written down and not felt: 2 Chronicles 20:15 puts the matter in God's hands rather than the frightened man's, and His Spirit is the one making that ancient courtyard your own kitchen while you sit there.

And there are terms, because a covenant always has them. God's side is the strength, the standing, the backing, the whole weight of it, and that side is settled and He swore it. Your side is to stop carrying it as though it were yours alone. That is genuinely something you do, and it is a real change: you say out loud whose strength is in front of the thing, and then you go and do Friday backed rather than braced.