The Long Road I Walked By Myself

Thirty one years in September.

You have kept every one of them. Not perfectly, and you would say so first, but you have never once gone somewhere else and you have never once stopped turning up.

And in the last year or two a question has started coming at you, usually in the truck, usually on a long haul, and it has a hard edge on it.

Was that faithfulness, or was I a fool?

Nobody has asked you that. You have asked it. And it is the kind of question that goes quiet when you get out of the truck and comes back the next time you get in.

Before anything else, and this comes before everything on this row.

If the person you live with frightens you, controls you, hurts you, or has made you smaller and more afraid than you used to be, then none of what follows applies and I am not going to wrap that in the language of promises. That is not faithfulness and it is not a road worth walking, and nobody who cares about you would tell you to keep absorbing it. Talk to somebody qualified where you live, this week, and if there is danger in that house, contact an emergency service or a domestic violence line today.

For everybody else, and I think that is most men who get to a page like this one: let us take the question seriously, because it deserves better than a compliment.

He will not fail thee nor forsake thee

There is a sentence in Deuteronomy said to a whole people about to walk into something hard, and the two verbs in it are the point.

he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee (Deuteronomy 31:6, King James Version)

Doth go with thee. Present tense, already happening, not a promise about arriving later.

And then two negatives that are not the same as each other. Not fail thee means He will not give out under load. Not forsake thee means He will not leave the road.

You have had company on every mile of that road, and Deuteronomy has never once described a faithful walk as an unaccompanied one. Deuteronomy 31:6 has God going with people through the hard thing rather than waiting at the end of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that concrete for a man in a truck at four in the morning.

That does something to your question. You have been asking whether thirty one years of walking alone was foolish. And the premise underneath it is that you walked alone.

You were never the only one on that road, and the word has never once put a man out there by himself. The passage puts God in the going rather than in the destination, and the Spirit of God is the one who corrects an old man's account of his own decades.

The honest answer to the question

Now let me actually answer it, because a preacher who dodges a hard question has not earned anything.

Faithfulness and foolishness are not opposites, and that is why the question is so hard to settle. A person can be faithful and can also have been treated badly. Both can be true at once. Loyalty does not become stupidity because it was not returned in equal measure.

What makes a thing foolish is not that it cost more than it gave. Most good things cost more than they give. What makes a thing foolish is that it was worth nothing, and thirty one years of a man turning up is not worth nothing, whatever anybody in that house did or did not do.

And there is one more thing to say, plainly. You made the promise to God. That is who received it. Which means the accounting for it does not run through whether she matched you, and it never did.

You are being answered by somebody who received the promise directly, and the return on it has never once been settled between two people alone. Deuteronomy 31:6 has God walking with somebody through the whole of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man his thirty one years landed somewhere.

You have not been a fool, and a promise that was not matched has never once become worthless because of it. It is written that He will not fail thee, nor forsake thee, and the Spirit of God is the one who puts an old question down where a man can look at it properly.

Tell one person, and I mean this week

Here is the assignment and it is going to be harder for you than for most people who read this site, and I know that.

Tell one person the truth about how alone this has been.

Not a group. One man or one woman, chosen because they can hear something without either instructing you or feeling sorry for you, which are the two failure modes.

And one sentence, not the thirty one years: I have been doing this on my own a long time and I have not said that out loud to anybody.

You are able to say one sentence to one person, and thirty one years of not saying it has never once made it impossible. Deuteronomy 31:6 has the going done in company from the start, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present the first time a man says the true sentence to another human being.

If there is nobody, a pastor or a counselor counts. That is not a lesser option. It is often the better one, because the job is already defined.