I Swore I Never Would

The chair is not even the same chair. Dale wants to be clear about that, because it would be too neat.

His father's chair got taken to the dump in 1998 by two of his cousins, and good riddance, and this one is a different chair in a different house in a different county, bought new, from a store, with a receipt. He picked it out himself. It is green.

He is fifty-two and he is sitting in it at nine in the evening with the television on and the sound down, which is exactly what his father did, and there is a glass on the arm of it, resting on the flat wooden part where a glass goes, which is exactly where his father's glass went, and the shape of the evening from here to bed is the same shape, hour for hour, that he watched from a doorway when he was nine years old.

He swore he never would. Out loud. More than once.

He swore it at eleven, sitting on the back step. He swore it at nineteen at the funeral, in the church parking lot, to his sister, who cried. He swore it at twenty-six on his wedding day, privately, in a room with a mirror, in a suit that did not fit.

And he did not, for a long time. Twenty-some years of not. It came slowly, in his forties, so slowly that there was never a day you could point at, and now it is nine in the evening and there is a glass on the arm of a green chair.

Here is what is actually going on in him at fifty-two, and it is not what people would guess. It is not shame about drinking. He has room for that; that is a familiar weight.

It is the feeling that the whole thing was decided before he was born. That the swearing was cute. That a boy sitting on a back step promising the sky was a small animal making a noise at a train.

It was always going to be me. I was just the last one to know.

And here is where I quit talking about Dale, because you watched somebody go this way and you made your own promise, and this week you have started to wonder whether the promise was ever yours to make.

An inheritance is not a sentence

Let me set the heavy thing down first, because you have been carrying it since your forties and it is not yours.

You were not sentenced before you were born. Nothing was decided about you in a house you grew up in, and the story your family tells about itself does not have the authority to tell you what you are.

I do not say that as consolation, and I could not say it out of my own head. It is written down, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it across a room at nine in the evening:

The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.Ezekiel 18:20

Notice how blunt God is being there. He is refusing, out loud, a thing that everybody in the ancient world assumed and that everybody in your county still assumes: that it runs down the line and lands on whoever is next. God says no. He says it plainly and He says it as a matter of law, not encouragement.

So the line does not carry a verdict onto you, and Scripture is where I get that rather than my own opinion, and God's Spirit is not sitting in that green chair reading your father's file over your shoulder.

What is real, and what is a story

Now let me be honest with you the way a neighbor ought to be, because there is a real thing here and I am not going to pretend there is not.

There is such a thing as an inheritance. Some of it is in the body. Some of it is in what a nine year old learned about what an evening is for while standing in a doorway. That is real and it is heavy and it makes the ground tilt, and anybody who waves that away has never watched it.

But an inheritance is a slope. It is not a sentence. A slope is a thing you stand on with help. A sentence is a thing that has already been decided about you by a court, and no court has met.

Hear this straight: what you are is not being determined by a dead man's evenings. You are a son of God and that is the deed on you, and Scripture says the son does not carry his father's guilt, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a thing you can stand up in rather than a verse in a book.

And now the plain half, and I want you to take it exactly as seriously as I am saying it. If you have been drinking every evening, please do not simply quit on your own. Coming off alcohol without medical supervision can be genuinely dangerous, and that is not a reason to keep going, it is the reason to see a doctor this week and tell him plainly how much and how often, so what happens next happens safely. And keep every other real help there is: the meeting, the counselor, the medicine, the man who calls you. None of that competes with God and none of it is weak faith. It is His kindness with a face and a telephone number on it.