He Cannot Make Himself Sign Anything

It is quarter past six in the morning and the light coming in over the sink is the good kind, low and orange, the kind that makes even a kitchen look like something.

The form is on the table. It has been on the table for nine days.

It is nothing. That is the part that makes him feel like he is losing his mind. A renewal, one page, four boxes and a line at the bottom, the sort of thing a man signs standing up with his keys in his other hand. He has read it four times, slowly, with a finger, the way you read something when you are looking for the trick. There is no trick. It is exactly what it says it is.

The pen is beside it. Good pen. His father's, actually, which is its own small joke this morning.

He picks the pen up.

He puts the pen down.

He gets up and makes more coffee he does not want, and stands at the counter with his back to the table while the machine does its noise, and thinks about the fact that he is a grown man who cannot sign a renewal.

Four months ago there was another table and another page, and somebody sat across from him and said his name the way people say your name when they want you comfortable, and everything on that page turned out to be untrue. He is not going through the details again this morning. He has been through them at two a.m., several times, and it does not come out different.

What is left of it is not the money and it is not even the shame, exactly.

What is left of it is this. His hand used to move. Now it does not, and he cannot find the place in himself where the moving used to come from.

You know this table. Maybe yours is a lease, or a job offer that is genuinely a good one, or a church you drove to twice and sat outside in the parking lot and drove home from. Maybe it is a person who has been nothing but kind to you for a year and something in you keeps waiting for the other thing. Somewhere in the last few months somebody you trusted turned out to be somebody else, and now every ordinary act of trust has a weight on it that other people cannot see.

Hear me before anything else. This is not a failure of faith. Not the nine days, not the four readings, not the coffee you do not want. And I am not going to explain to you why it happened. I am also not going to tell you that you should have seen it coming, because I do not believe that and because it is the sentence you have already said to yourself more times than anyone else could.

I am going to sit down at the table with you instead. Push the form over a little. Leave the pen where it is.

Right is a builder's word

The line I want on this table with us is short, and it is not about feelings.

For the word of the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth.Psalm 33:4

Right, in that sentence, is not right as in correct opinion. The word underneath it is a builder's word. Straight. Level. True the way a door frame is true, the word you would use standing back with one eye closed against a plumb bob.

And the second half is load bearing too. All his works are done in truth, and truth there means reliability, the kind of solidity you put weight on. It is the same family of words as amen. Not "God is sincere." Closer to "this will hold you."

You are dealing this morning with One whose word runs straight, and He was straight in every one of the nine days that form has been lying on your table. That is not my reassurance about your Tuesday: Psalm 33:4 puts the straightness in His word and the reliability in His works, both stated as fact and not as hope, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a builder's word off a page and sets it down inside a man who has stopped trusting builders.

Now here is what I am not going to do with that verse, and I want it said plainly, because somebody has probably already done it to you.

I am not going to use it as a lever. I am not going to say that because God is trustworthy you should therefore be over this by now, or that a trustworthy God means the injury to your trust is somehow illegitimate. That is a verse being used as a crowbar, and I will not do it.

You were injured in the place where trusting happens, and you are not being asked to pretend the injury is not there. What is written never once shames a man for the damage done to him by somebody else, and the Spirit of God is named the Comforter, which is a word for one who comes and sits down, not for one who argues you out of your own experience.

The hand that will not move is not the enemy

I want to say something about that hand, because it has been treated all week as the problem.

The hand that will not sign is not rebellion and it is not unbelief. It is a splint. Something got broken in you four months ago and your body put a splint on it without asking your permission, and the splint is doing exactly what a splint does: it is refusing to let the injured part take weight yet.

You have been standing over yourself demanding that the splint come off on schedule.

You are not further from God because your hand is slow, and you were not moved off His ground by what somebody else did on theirs. Scripture ties the reliability to His works and never to the steadiness of the person reading about them, and it is His Spirit who does the actual holding while a man's own trusting apparatus is out of service.

And here is the distinction the whole morning turns on, and it is small enough to carry to work.

What happened to you was a man doing something in the dark. What Psalm 33 says is that all His works are done in truth, which means there is no dark room where He does the other kind. There is no version of God with a folder and a way of saying your name.

You have not been dealing with the same kind of thing at all, and the One at this table has never handed you a page that was not what it said it was. The written word makes the truthfulness cover all His works, with no exceptions carved out anywhere, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is the one who can tell the difference for you when your own instrument is still bent.