A Name Nobody Would Shake On

The feed store on the corner has been there longer than anyone can prove, and the old fellow behind the counter has the ledger open at the right page before you have got the door shut behind you.

He went in to open an account. Thirty-five years old, taken on a hundred and sixty acres of his own, first time in his life he has needed one.

The old man asked for his name and he gave it.

And there was a pause.

Not a long one. Not rude. Nobody said anything and nobody looked at anybody, and then the old man said, easily, the way you say a thing you have said a thousand times: I will need something in writing.

He said: Sure.

He carried the sacks out to the truck and drove home with the windows down and his ears going, because his father has been fifteen years dead and the pause is still in the room.

Here is what he will tell you about his father, and it is not what the county says, and he has thought about it a great deal.

His father meant it. Every time. He meant it at the gate and he meant it on the phone and he meant it standing in somebody's yard with his hat in his hand, and he could not carry it. Whatever it took to get from meaning a thing to doing it, he did not have, and he knew he did not have it, and toward the end he said so once, at a kitchen table, and then never again.

That is a truer sentence than the one that goes around the county, and his son is the only man alive who uses it.

But it does not change the pause. In that county a handshake is still legal tender for most things, and for four decades one name was not accepted at par, and the son has been paying the difference at every counter since he was old enough to be sent in for anything.

Then October, and a gate, and a neighbor who needed a hand with the calving pens.

He said: I will be here Tuesday.

His boy was standing at his hip, seven years old, doing nothing, listening to everything the way they do.

And in the truck on the way home, out of the middle of nowhere, the boy said: Are we actually going Tuesday?

Not suspicious. Not clever. He simply wanted to know whether the plan was real, because he has already noticed that some plans are and some are not, and he is seven, and he has started checking.

His father pulled up at the mailbox and sat there with the engine running.

Because that boy has to learn what a man's word is from somebody, and there is nobody up the line to copy. He does not have a model. He has a warning, and a warning will not teach a man how to build anything.

You have sat at that mailbox.

The verse is about the walking

There is a proverb people quote at men like you, and it is usually quoted at the wrong end.

The just man walketh in his integrity: his children are blessed after him.Proverbs 20:7

The eye goes straight to the second half and starts calculating, and that is the wrong end of the sentence, and it is also the end that will put you back in the truck at the mailbox with nothing in your hands.

Go to the front of it. The just man walketh. That is the verb the verse is built on, and walking is done one step at a time from wherever the feet currently are. It says nothing whatever about where the road came from. A man who arrives on a road at thirty-five with no company is on the road.

But look at the adjective before the verb, because that is the load-bearing member and everybody walks past it.

The just man. Where does a man get just?

Not from a county. Not from a line. Scripture is explicit that righteousness is given, not descended: God made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him. That is a standing conferred by God on a man from outside his own history, and the Holy Spirit was sent into him as the seal on it, and neither of those consulted his surname.

So take this over you, sitting there with the engine running. You are the just man in that proverb by gift and not by descent, and Scripture says the righteousness is God's own, put on you in Christ, while His Spirit is the one who makes a given thing feel like a real one.

Nothing here needs demolishing

Now let me correct the picture of this job, because the picture is making it harder than it is.

The picture in your head is of a man up against something. One man set against forty years of a county's arithmetic, alone, with no help and no precedent, fighting to overturn a verdict on a name.

Put that down. It is a heavier job than the one God has actually given you.

Here is the real work, and I say it as a man who has poured concrete. There is nothing to demolish. What was there was an absence, and an absence cannot be fought, only filled. The job is a footing on ground that never had one, which is ordinary work, done in the ordinary way, at the ordinary rate: one bay at a time, cured before it is loaded.

And no man on this ground is starting from nothing, whatever the county thinks.

For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named.Ephesians 3:14-15

Read the last four words twice. The whole family is named of Him. Not of a grandfather, not of a county, not of a run of men who meant things they could not carry. There is a name older than the one over the feed store door and you were given it, and the giving is on record in Scripture, and the Spirit of God inside you is what makes a man carry a name he did not earn without swaggering about it.