Thurs, Jan. 30
... And I swear it all over again
When I was in high school, I remember having a conversation once with David about making promises. He quoted the passage in Matthew that says, "But I tell you, do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God's throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your 'yes' be 'yes' and your 'no,' 'no;' anything beyond this comes from the evil one." (Matt. 5:34-37)
The conversation went something along the lines of, can we make promises? Should we make promises? A promise is something that we give an oath to; by God's standards, a promise is to be unequivocally kept, and I don't have that power. I can't promise you that I'll meet you for coffee, because I don't know if I'll get hit by a truck, or if the coffee shop will burn down, or whatever.
I think, also, it's saying that we shouldn't need to swear by anything. If I tell you yes, that should be enough...
But that conversation about whether we should even be making promises in the first place has stuck with me for a long time, and as I get older, I'm starting to realize more of the wisdom in that. There have been many promises that I've made. Some, I've kept. Some, I haven't. Not necessarily because I've set out to break them, but because life has just changed directions and they've become irrelevant. And I wonder... in God's eyes, does that promise bind me to that person, in some way, no matter how "small"? Would letting my "yes" be "yes" be better? Does that take care of the moment, and leave the future up to God, not to me?
It seems to me that, by making promises, I'm trying to take the future into my own hands.
"Yes, I promise that I'll be there for you and I'll be your child's godmother--when you have children, ten years down the road."
Is that any better than, "You need me today, so I'll be here for you today. Yes. This is the moment I'm living in, so this is the only one that I can answer for."
The promise binds us together in a way that we--whoever "we" is in any given situation--may not be intended to be bound together in. Does God hold that like he holds a marriage, even if it's to the "wrong" person? If that happens, I don't think that God will let us divorce the first to marry the "right" one. The first becomes the right one; he's the one I'm bound to for life, for better or worse, till death do us part. Even if there would have been someone different if I'd held out for it.
I think that something like marriage is meant to be life-binding. But are promises outside of a lifetime commitment like that? When I break a promise, how seriously does God take that? Is it something that he sees almost like a divorce? Like I've now broken a commitment that I bound myself to, whether I wanted to or not?
I don't know. It's a sticky subject...
But I just know that the conversation that David and I had about it all those years ago is still with me, and it still makes me think twice before I tell someone, "I promise that..."
And the more promises I make, the more promises I break, and the more promises I have made and broken to me, the more I wonder if that's really the way it's supposed to be. When did a person's word become worth so little? When did we stop caring what kind of reputation and integrity is associated with our names? Somewhere along the line, it became virtually meaningless, and I don't think that's the way it was supposed to be.
infinite || abyss
posted at 12:15 a.m.
