I Meant It And I Did Not Understand It

Both of those are true and you have never been able to hold them at the same time.

You meant it. Whatever else you doubt, do not doubt that. Twenty six year old you stood up in front of people and said something she believed all the way down.

And twenty six year old you had no idea. None. She did not know about the year with the hospital, or the eleven months of no money, or what it does to a person to watch somebody they love get quiet for a decade.

So which is it? A real promise, or a promise made by somebody who could not have known what she was signing?

That question has been running underneath for a long time, and it usually surfaces when something hard is happening, which is the worst possible time for it to arrive.

I am going to give you a straight answer, and then I am going to show you where it comes from, and then I am going to give you something to do that takes ninety seconds.

The answer is that meaning it and understanding it were never the same test, and only one of them was ever required.

A promise made about a future nobody could see

There is a stone in Genesis with a sentence on it, and the sentence is famous, and the situation around it is almost never mentioned.

The LORD watch between me and thee, when we are absent one from another (Genesis 31:49, King James Version)

Two men who did not trust each other set up a heap of stones and made an agreement about a future neither of them could see. They did not know where the other would be. They did not know what would happen.

So what did they do about the not knowing? They put it on God. They said: the LORD watch. He is the one with visibility here. We are not.

You are covered by somebody with a view of the whole thing, and Genesis 31 has never once asked either party to see the future first. Genesis 31:49 puts the watching on the LORD precisely because the two people cannot do it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a woman who did not know what was coming.

That is the structure of every promise a human being has ever made. You say the thing. Somebody with a longer view holds it.

You have never been the one who was supposed to know, and the word has never once made foresight a condition of a vow. The passage has two people admit their own blindness out loud and hand the watching over, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the weight of not knowing off a person twenty years later.

What you actually promised

Let me put the two things side by side, because once they are separated the fear loses most of its grip.

Understanding is knowledge of what is coming. Meaning it is the state of your will when you speak. Those are different faculties and they were never measured together.

If understanding were the requirement, no promise in human history would be valid. Nobody has ever known what a life would ask. Every vow ever made was made in ignorance, including the good ones, including the ones that held for sixty years.

What was on trial that afternoon was whether you meant it. And you did. You said so with your whole chest at twenty six and you were telling the truth.

You are holding a promise that was valid the moment you meant it, and understanding has never once been on the form. Genesis 31:49 has an agreement stand between two people who could not see a week ahead, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says a will is what was being asked for, not a forecast.

And here is the part that turns it right side up. The not knowing was not a weakness in the promise. It is the reason a promise was needed at all. Nobody makes a vow about a thing they can already see.

You were making the only kind of promise there is, and a certain future has never once been the sort of thing anybody vows over. The written word raises a heap of stones exactly where two people cannot see, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that a comfort instead of an alarm.

Ninety seconds with both women in the room

Here is the thing to do, and it is a little unusual, and it works.

Alone, out loud, to God, say your vows again. But say them with both versions of yourself present.

Say the promise. Then say what you know now that she did not. Out loud. The hospital year. The money. The quiet decade. Name them.

You are bringing the years into the room with the promise, and Genesis 31 has never once asked anybody to leave what they learned outside. Genesis 31:49 hands the watching to the LORD across everything two people could not see, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present while both versions of a woman speak.

Then say the promise again, the same words, on the other side of that list.

That is the whole exercise. It takes about ninety seconds and it does something a lot of thinking will not do, because it puts the two women in the same room and lets them agree.

You are able to say it again with your eyes open, and the second saying has never once been a correction of the first. Genesis 31:49 puts the LORD as the watcher between people through everything they cannot see, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman says the same words twice, twenty years apart.

Do not tell anybody you did it. That is not a rule, it is just that this one works better small.