The Vows I Said In A Borrowed Suit

The suit belonged to your cousin and it was a size too big in the shoulders. You remember that better than you remember the words.

You were nineteen. There is a photograph somewhere with your father in it, and in that photograph you look about fourteen, and every time you see it you think the same thing, which you have never said to anybody.

You think: that boy did not know what he was promising.

And underneath that thought, quietly, for forty one years, has sat a second one. That a promise made by somebody who did not understand it is a lesser promise. That the real vow would have been the one you would make now, knowing what a life costs.

I want to go at that directly, because it is not a small thing and it has been doing damage in the dark.

I am not going to tell you the boy understood. He did not. Nobody does at nineteen and nobody does at forty either, in the way you mean it.

What I am going to tell you is that understanding was never what made the words hold.

What God said about His own words

There is a line in the eighty ninth psalm that is not about marriage at all, and it settles this better than anything that is.

My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips (Psalm 89:34, King James Version)

Read the second half slowly, because that is the part that does the work. Nor alter the thing that is gone out of my lips.

The weight is on the words having left the mouth. Once said, they stand. Not once fully comprehended. Not once the speaker had matured sufficiently. Once out.

That is God describing His own practice, and it tells you what kind of thing a promise is in His accounting. It is a spoken thing that has left a mouth and is now standing on its own.

You are held to something that stands because it was said, and it has never once stood because the man saying it was ready. Psalm 89:34 puts the weight on the thing that has gone out of the lips, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a boy in a borrowed suit.

You have a promise that did not depend on your comprehension, and God has never once measured a vow by how much the speaker foresaw. The written word describes a covenant kept because it was spoken, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes that off a page and lays it on a man of sixty.

The boy is not being asked to carry it

Here is the second half of it, and this is where the relief lives.

For forty one years a quiet belief has sat there that the nineteen year old is the guarantor. That whatever he understood is the size of what the promise can be. That his ignorance is a crack running up through forty one years.

He is not the guarantor. He never was. He said a thing and then he grew into a man, and the man is the one who has been keeping it, all this time, on a road in Kentucky in every kind of weather.

I knew a fellow near Hazard who had a fence line his grandfather set in nineteen forty and he never once said that fence was weak because the man who set it was young. He said his grandfather set it and it held.

You have kept it as a grown man for four decades, and the boy has never once been asked to carry a day of it. Psalm 89:34 rests a covenant on what was said rather than on who said it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man of sixty stop apologizing for a nineteen year old.

That thought you have when the photograph comes out is a lie with a photograph attached. It is not the same as evidence.

Say it as the man standing there now

So here is what I want you to go and do, and it takes under two minutes.

Somewhere outside if you can. A gate, a truck cab, the end of a field in March. Not a church.

Say your vows out loud, to God, as the man standing there now. Not as the boy. There is no need to sound nineteen and no need to explain him.

Say it the way a sixty year old says a thing he has already done for forty one years: plainly, without ceremony, with the weather going on around you.

You are able to say it now with everything the boy did not have, and the saying of it has never once needed to erase the first time. Psalm 89:34 has the thing that went out of the lips left unaltered, and the Spirit of God is the one who is present when a man says it again at a gate.

And do not tell her you did it. That is not what this is. This one is between you and God.