The God Who Keeps It

The house at the top of the road has been empty since April and there is a sign in the yard now, and every time she drives past it she takes her eyes off it deliberately, which is its own kind of looking.

Ada lived there for forty one years. She was ninety when she died and she died in the spring, and it was not a sad death by anybody's reckoning: her people came, she knew them all, it was quick at the end.

Here is the part that is not simple.

Four winters ago there was a week when the power was off on that road for three days and it went down to single figures, and she had gone up there with a flask and blankets and sat with Ada until her son came. And driving home that night she said out loud, in the truck, to God:

I will never let a winter go by without checking on her. Not one.

She checked that winter. She checked the next one twice, at the start, when she remembered.

Then two winters went by and she did not go once. Not once. There was no reason. There was work and there was her own mother and there was the ordinary business of a life on a road where everybody is busy, and Ada had her son and the church van and a phone that worked. And then it was April and there was a car in the yard and then there was a funeral and then there was a sign.

She cannot fix it. That is the flat and terrible arithmetic of this one. There is no going up there now, no making it right, no late visit that counts double. The person is gone and the thing is done and there is nothing available to her that would settle it.

And somewhere in the middle of that she stopped talking to God, because she felt that a woman who does that has forfeited the right to ask Him for anything.

You may be carrying one where the person is gone. Where the arithmetic will not balance and there is nothing left to do. This is the hardest kind, and I am not going to pretend it is not.

What He is actually called

I want to give you a name of God tonight, because names are what plain people hold on to, and this one is stated in a place where you would not expect tenderness.

Moses is laying out the terms. He is being about as blunt as he ever gets. And in the middle of it he stops to say what kind of God they are dealing with, and the description is not what most people carry in their heads.

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.Deuteronomy 7:9

You stand inside a covenant that has a keeper, and the keeper has never once been you. Deuteronomy 7:9 names Him the faithful God which keepeth covenant and mercy, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been keeping it through every winter you did not go.

Which keepeth covenant

Read the verb and read who it belongs to.

Which keepeth covenant. He does. He is the one described as doing the keeping, and He is called faithful in the same breath, and the whole sentence is offered as the thing you should know about Him, as in: get this right and a great many other things follow.

Now, there is a second half to the verse and I am not going to skip it, because this category holds its terms. With them that love him and keep his commandments. There is a walking here. There is a real life to live inside this and it involves keeping. I would not respect you if I pretended otherwise, and neither would Moses.

But notice which keeping is which. His keeping is of the covenant. Ours is of what He tells us, day by day, in front of us, in ordinary daylight. And when ours goes badly for two winters, His does not become ours to do.

You stand inside a covenant that has a keeper, and the keeper has never been you. Deuteronomy 7:9 is where He is given that name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a farewell speech and lays it on a woman driving past a house with a sign in the yard.

And look at the reach of it. To a thousand generations. That is not arithmetic, it is a way of saying a length no one at that campfire could picture. Two winters against a thousand generations is not a rounding error, because it is not on the same ledger at all.

You have a standing measured in a length you cannot picture, and two winters did not shorten it. Scripture says it in so many words, and that is the plain sense of a thousand generations, and the Spirit of God has held that length steady through everything you have not been able to fix.

The thing you cannot mend

Now let me say the hard thing plainly, because you would smell it if I softened it.

You cannot mend it. That is true. Ada is buried and there is no visit that counts double and there is no arrangement available to you that puts the two winters back.

But grief and standing are two different things, and they have been welded together in you, and I want to take a chisel to the weld.

The grief is real and it is yours and you should carry it the way you would carry any real thing: honestly, and not forever at full weight. That she died without you going up is a genuine sorrow. It is not, however, a change in your position with God, because your position with God was never held in place by a winter visit, and it cannot be lost by the absence of one.

You are grieving something real and you are not standing outside anything. Scripture calls Him the faithful God who keeps covenant, and the Spirit of God has kept it through two winters in which you kept nothing at all.