His Father's Guitar in a Bad Winter

There is a corner of the front room where the case used to stand, and there has never been anything else put there.

Not on purpose. He would tell you that. There is just a gap between the bookshelf and the wall about the width of a hard case laid on its edge, and in twenty years nobody in that house has ever set a lamp or a chair or a stack of anything in it, and nobody has ever said why.

The winter it happened was the bad one. The stove and the roof and the whole long argument with the weather, and a neighbor two farms over who came through it beside them and never once made a thing of it. Kept the drive open. Kept the stove fed. Sat with his wife the night the fever turned. He asked for nothing, and that was the problem, because a man cannot carry that and go on standing straight, and there was nothing in that house worth putting in a man's hands.

Except one thing.

His father had a Gibson from before he was born, and he had learned on it standing between his father's knees, and it had come to him the summer his father died. It was the only object in the world that had his father's hands worn into it. He carried it two farms over in March with his coat over it against the sleet, and he put it in the man's arms and said something short, and he walked home.

And the man took it, and was gracious about it, and to this day has never once played it in front of him.

That was twenty years ago and he has not touched a string since. Not his. Not anybody's. He has been in rooms where a guitar came out and he has excused himself to see about the truck. He has stood at the back of church and let a whole song go by with his hands in his pockets. At a wedding four years ago somebody put one in his lap as a joke and he handed it on down the row so smoothly that nobody noticed anything at all, and then he went outside and stood in the parking lot for eleven minutes.

He is not bitter. He would give it again. He thinks about that man with real gratitude and says so out loud when the name comes up. It is not the guitar.

It is that some part of him decided, in the sleet, that he was the kind of son who hands his father over, and he has been serving that opinion of himself ever since, quietly, in a house with a gap in it.

Tonight it is warm on the porch and somebody down the road has a radio going and the light is going honey colored on the field.

You know this. I am not going to ask you what yours was, and I am not going to guess at it, and I am not going to make you say the winter it happened in. But you know exactly what it is to have handed something over and then to have spent twenty years staying well clear of anything that reminds you it existed.

The Thing That Actually Left

Let me be exact about what went two farms over in the sleet, because a great deal depends on it.

An instrument left. That is real and it is not nothing. But the instrument is not what has kept a man out of every room with music in it for twenty years, because an instrument can be replaced and he knows it and he has had a thousand chances.

What left was the music his father put in his hands. The standing between the knees. The right to be a man who plays, which had been handed down to him the way trades and names get handed down, and which he decided in one afternoon he had forfeited. That is what has not been in that house since March of that year, and that is the specific thing this message is about putting back in your hands.

You are being bought back at the exact point where you handed something over, and God is not confused about which part actually left. Scripture says that the Lord your God redeemed you, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the reasonableness of that idea, who takes it off a page and lays it on a man standing in a parking lot for eleven minutes.

And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God redeemed you.Deuteronomy 15:15

Notice what that verse is doing. It is not asking Israel to feel bad about Egypt. It is telling a freed people to hold two things at once: that they really were slaves, and that the Lord really did buy them out. It says remember. It does not say get over it and it does not say pretend it never was.

The record stands and the verdict is changed. Both. In one sentence, in the same breath, by the same God, and He is the one who put them together that way.

You have been redeemed out of the winter itself, and the memory of it is not evidence against the redemption. It is written that the Lord your God redeemed you, in the finished tense, and His Spirit is the one who lets a man remember a March accurately without being ruled by it.

And I want to say this once, plainly, and then leave it alone. If somebody's hand was on yours when you handed a thing over, that was never your handing. A pushed signature is not a signature. Some of what a man carries as his own doing was arranged for him by people who understood exactly what they were doing, and God is not the least bit confused about which is which even when you are.

Redeemed Means Somebody Else Does the Buying

Here is the part that has to be said slowly, because a man like this will agree with it in his head in about four seconds and go on living as though it were false.

He cannot buy it back. That is the whole point of the word. In the old law the redeemer is always somebody other than the one who lost the thing, and he acts on his own initiative, out of his own standing, and the person being redeemed contributes exactly nothing to it. Not effort. Not service. Not twenty years of staying out of rooms.

Because that is what those twenty years have been. Not grief. Payment. A long, quiet, self-imposed installment plan of never putting his hands on a guitar again, offered up to nobody, received by nobody, and accepted by no court in heaven or earth.

You have been given back what you handed over, and not one hour of your twenty years was part of what bought it. Scripture says we were redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible for a man to stop contributing to something that is already finished.

And He did not buy back a lesser version. That is worth saying too. He is not offering you a careful, chastened, apologetic little life in the shape of the one you lost, where you are allowed to hum but not to play. When the redeemer acts in the old law, the thing goes back whole and it goes back to its own family and it goes back with its standing intact.

You are holding your father's music in your own two hands right now, and nothing about a March twenty years ago disinherited you. He promised in His word to restore what the years have eaten, and the same Spirit who raised Christ from the dead is the one who does the restoring, in the actual hands of an actual man on a porch.