The Deal I Made in the Corridor

Gethin has never told anybody the exact words, which is one of the reasons they have had nineteen years to keep working on him.

He was twenty-six. He was sitting on the floor of a hospital corridor at about four in the morning with his back against a radiator that was too hot, in the specific kind of quiet that only exists in that building at that hour. He was not a religious man. He had not been inside a church since a wedding.

And he made a deal.

He would not say it like that now. He would say he prayed. But he knows, and he has known for a while, that what he actually did was set out terms, and that he has been keeping his side of them ever since like a man paying down a mortgage he does not remember signing.

He gave up the thing he had been giving up and failing to give up for four years, and this time it took. He started going, and he still goes. He has never once, in nineteen years, walked past somebody in trouble on a street, which sounds small until you consider that most people manage it several times a week.

She came home from that hospital. That is the part that makes the rest of it so hard to say out loud. She came home, and there were fourteen more years, and they were good ones, and then there were not.

And in the eight years since, Gethin has kept every clause, and has never once said the thing that sits underneath, which is roughly: I did all of it, and I would do all of it again, and I have never been told whether any of it counted.

The shame is right there behind that sentence, and he cannot get away from it, because he would tell you himself that God is not a vending machine. He has told other people that.

What finally cracked it was a lad at work, twenty-two, who does not know one thing about any of it, who saw him at the end of a bad Thursday and said: you all right? Come on. I'm not asking you to talk. I'll just walk out with you.

I'll just walk out with you.

Gethin stood in a car park at the end of a Thursday and found that his eyes had gone, and he could not have explained it to a single person he works with.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the corridor.

He thought: I have spent nineteen years paying, and what I actually wanted was for somebody to come and walk out with me.

Let me say the word properly first

Before we go on I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be clear than clever with a man standing in a car park.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not an outcome, not what is owed. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something startling with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here, and it is not a smaller helping given to the people whose deal did not hold.

And let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting the person you love to live is not a sin, and making a deal on a corridor floor at four in the morning is not superstition. It is what human beings do, and I would not think much of anybody who had never done it. Nothing on this page ties what God does to what you have or to what you give, and that wire is not run here and never will be. If you are genuinely short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

And one more thing before we go further. Whoever taught you that God trades, and somebody did, in a family or a film or the general air everybody breathes, is not on trial in this article. What I want to look at is the terms, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at them.

He never asked for the payment in the first place

Hosea writes six words that undid an entire religious economy, and he writes them as an explanation rather than as an accusation.

For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.Hosea 6:6

Understand what that is doing. He is speaking to people who were bringing exactly what they had been told to bring, at real cost, in good faith, and He is not saying they were bad people. He is saying: this is not the currency. It never was.

Sacrifice is something you can hand over and walk away from. Knowledge of God is something that can only happen if you stay in the room. One of those two can be paid. The other one can only be entered.

You are not a fool for the nineteen years. You are a man who did the most serious thing he knew how to do on the worst night of his life, and then honored it for two decades, which is more than most people manage about anything. The written word does not mock a single one of those years, and it is the Holy Spirit who lets a man hear that in a car park as company rather than as correction.

And here is the sentence that costs something to say and is worth the cost. If God had ever accepted the terms, you would have every right to your complaint at the end of that Thursday. The reason the complaint has nowhere to go is not that you kept it badly, and it is certainly not that you failed. It is that He never wanted the payment. He wanted you, and He has wanted you since long before that corridor, and a man who is wanted cannot be underpaid.

What the nineteen years were actually doing

You have been known the whole time, and that is not a consolation being offered now that the fourteen years are over. His word says He desires the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings, present tense, no clause about outcomes anywhere in it, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact in a body rather than a sentence in a book.

Think about what actually broke you open. It wasn't the Thursday. You've had worse Thursdays.

It was a twenty-two year old saying I'm not asking you to talk, I'll just walk out with you. It was somebody staying in the room with no terms attached at all. You were starving to be walked out with. You still are, and there is nothing soft about it in a man who has carried what you have carried.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Every one of those nineteen years was seen. Not one of them was payment and not one of them was wasted, and both of those are true at once. Jesus wept at a graveside where He knew exactly what He was about to do, which means the grief was not a formality He was going through, and He was on that corridor floor with His back against the same radiator.