Consistent at Nothing Since June

The path is the thing he cannot walk past.

Twenty-two slabs down, laid true, and then about four meters of churned clay, and a heap of sharp sand under a blue tarp that has gone white on top from a whole summer of sun. He laid those twenty-two in one weekend in May with the radio going. His mother sat in the kitchen doorway with a cardigan over her shoulders and told him twice that he was doing it wrong, and once, at the end of the Sunday, that it was the best thing anybody had done to that house in thirty years.

She died on a Tuesday morning in June, about ten past six. He was there. The rest of that week he still cannot put into any order, and he has stopped trying.

And since then, nothing he has begun has been finished.

The men's breakfast, where he told them in July he would be back next month, and it is now well the wrong side of the summer. The tomatoes in her greenhouse, which he watered every single evening for sixteen days and then not once again, and the pots are still standing there because throwing them out is a job he has also not done. The reading. The walking. Four different apps, each one used properly for about nine days. A letter to her sister that he has started three times on three different sheets of paper, and all three sheets are in the drawer under the phone, and he knows which drawer.

Praying, too, if he is honest about it, and he is not often honest about it. He begins and gets a sentence and a half in and then finds he has been listening to the fridge for a while.

He is not a lazy man. That is what he cannot make sense of. He worked forty years and was never once late, and now he cannot see a thing through from one end to the other, and he has begun to think that the man who laid twenty-two slabs in a weekend was somebody else and is not coming back.

Then a Saturday in October, the neighbor's boy cutting through the garden the way he always has, stops at the clay and asks him straight out, are you going to finish this path.

And he hears himself say, I will get to it.

He hears it. Standing there with a mug in his hand, he hears the voice he just used, and he knows exactly where he has heard it before, because it is the voice he has been using on God since June.

You know that voice. You have your own version of it and your own drawer with three unfinished sheets in it, and somewhere in the last few months you have quietly reached a conclusion about yourself.

The psalm ends with a man asking God not to put him down

Psalm 138 is a confident psalm, all the way through. Praise before the gods, kings of the earth hearing the words of God's mouth, the Lord regarding the lowly. And then it ends, in one verse, like this.

The LORD will perfect that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.Psalm 138:8

Take the three clauses one at a time, because the order of them is doing all the work.

The finishing is God's. Not, I will perfect what concerns me. The LORD will. The completing of this man is on somebody else's list of jobs.

The enduring is God's mercy. Not the man's stamina, not his streak, not the number of consecutive mornings. Mercy that endures for ever is being contrasted with something that does not endure, and the psalmist knows exactly what that something is, because he is standing in it.

And then the last clause, which is the one for you. He does not say, give me the strength to finish. He says, forsake not the works of thine own hands. He is not offering to try harder. He is pointing at himself, this half-laid thing, this stalled and churned-up stretch, and appealing to the workman.

Right now, as you read, you are being held by the same clause. Scripture puts the perfecting in the Lord's hands and not in your consistency, and the Holy Spirit, who was moving on the man who wrote that line, is the one carrying it across to a kitchen in October.

Whose hands the work is

Now, one warm sentence and I will only say it once, because you do not need it twice: the path still matters. Finishing things is good, the letter to her sister is worth writing, and nothing here is a license to leave the tarp on that sand until it rots.

But the path was never the thing holding the covenant up. It cannot be. Read the verse again and see who is described as the maker and who is described as the work: you are the workmanship in that sentence, not the workman, and Paul says the same thing another way when he writes that the One who began a good work carries it through to completion (Philippians 1:6). The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that sentence about you and not merely about David.

That is the whole difference between a covenant and a contract, and it is worth being plain about. In a contract, the work of your hands is what keeps the other party bound. In this, the work of His hands is what keeps you bound to Him.

You have not slipped out of anything since June. Nothing has been dropped, nothing has lapsed, and Scripture says His mercy endures for ever with no clause after it about your attendance, while His Spirit has been at work in a house where nobody was managing to pray properly.

He abides faithful

There is a sentence in Paul's last letter that this category exists for, and it should be said slowly.

If we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.2 Timothy 2:13

Look at the reason given. Not, He is very patient with us. Not, He makes allowances. He cannot deny Himself. His faithfulness to you is anchored in His own nature, so the only way for it to fail is for God to stop being God.

That is why the grief of this year has not put you outside anything. A man who has been consistent at nothing for four months has not changed what God is, and God is what the covenant rests on.

You are kept by Him and not by your streak, and it was written down long before you had a bad summer, and the Holy Spirit is the seal on it while you sit there with a cold mug.