The Promise You Never Paid

She lit the candles herself, three of them, in the little side chapel where the paint is coming off the wall behind the statue.

She was twenty nine. She knelt there long enough that her knees hurt on the way home, and she made God a promise. A real one, the kind her grandmother would have recognized, with a specific thing in it that she would do if God did the thing she was asking.

God did not do the thing she was asking. And she never did her part either, because the part was contingent, and so the whole matter simply went into a drawer.

That was a long time ago and she still goes to that church. That is the part she has never been able to explain to anybody. She goes most weeks, and she is welcome and she is loved and she has made the coffee more times than anybody can count, and every single time she walks past that side chapel something in her shoulders changes.

It is not fear. It is something duller and more permanent than fear. It is the feeling of a woman who thinks she has an unsettled account in a building where everybody else is just there.

She has prayed about it. Of course she has. She prays with the family at Christmas and she prays in the car and she prays with the words she learned as a girl, which still come out first when she is frightened.

And a woman from the parish, who has known her thirty years and has never once been unkind, said over the washing up: has anyone in this family fasted for it?

She said maybe. She has thought about it every day since. And what stirred in her was not hope. It was the possibility of settlement. Here was a way to pay what she never paid.

If you have walked past a chapel with your shoulders up, come and sit here in the hall a while.

There is nothing disgraceful about the candles

Let us settle that before another word, because this has been carried in silence a long time.

There is nothing shameful in what you did in that side chapel. Hannah made a vow. Jacob made one with a stone under his head. It is what love does when it is frightened and has run out of every single thing it can control, and it comes up from the same place as your truest praying.

You are not in trouble for it, and you were never once assessed on whether you carried it out. That is not a kindness offered to a woman with a tea towel in her hand. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who read what was actually happening on those knees, which was not a contract. It was somebody who loved somebody and had nothing else left to offer.

So nothing here is going to tell you off, and nothing here will pretend you did not make it. There is a third thing, and it is better than either.

What He said He will not turn away

There is a psalm written by a man with a genuinely serious matter on his hands, and it names exactly what God does not want and exactly what He will not refuse.

For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.Psalm 51:16

Notice the first clause. Else would I give it. He would have paid, gladly, if paying had been the thing.

And then the sentence turns and tells him what God actually will not turn away, and it is not an act performed later to make something good. It is a heart that comes in honestly. That is the only thing named, and it is named as the thing God will not despise, which is a promise with the door taken off its hinges.

You are already welcome to come in exactly as you are, and you have been the whole time. I am not saying it to make a Sunday easier: it is what the psalm states plainly about God's own preferences (Psalm 51:17), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who turns it from a verse you have heard read into something that changes how you walk past that chapel.

Then what is fasting for, if not settlement

Here is the honest answer, and it is much smaller than what stirred in you at the sink.

Fasting is not a payment. It is not settlement, it is not restitution, and it is not the way an old promise gets made good. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and kneels until her knees hurt, turning toward God with nothing at all in her hands.

And here is the trap laid for somebody carrying an unpaid promise, so let it be said out loud. Do not let it become the payment. A person with an open account will offer anything that looks like currency: sincerity, effort, a stricter year, a purer heart, more candles. You are not asked for any of it, and none of it was ever the currency. Scripture says not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us (Titus 3:5), and it is His Spirit who makes that a change in your shoulders rather than a doctrine you would nod along with.

Now something said here in the open and not in small print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of what a doctor said. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody because of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.