His Father's Watch in the Drawer

The drawer sticks in winter. It has always stuck in winter, and he always forgets, and he pulls it too hard so the whole desk knocks the wall and the lamp shivers.

Inside: a stapler, a roll of tape gone amber at the edge, three keys to doors that are not in this house. And at the back, under everything, wrapped in a soft yellow cloth, his father's watch.

Steel case. Brown strap stiff and pale at the fold where a wrist used to bend it. The hands are stopped at twenty past four, which is not the hour of anything. It is simply where a watch arrives when nobody winds it, and nobody thinks to write down the hour a watch stops, so twenty past four has sat there for eighteen years meaning nothing at all.

He picks it up the way you pick something up in a museum where the sign says please do not touch and there is nobody else in the room. Two fingers. Flat on the palm. He turns it over. There is a scratch across the back that he can remember his father getting, on a gate latch, on a Sunday, in a heavy coat.

Eighteen winters. Two house moves, a new job, a daughter married, a boiler replaced twice. The watch has come along in the yellow cloth every single time, and it has never been on his wrist, and it has never been wound. He knows exactly how to wind it. There is a small crown at the side, it takes three or four turns, it is not complicated, and he has never once done it.

At the funeral his mother put it into his hand in the car park and said, take it, it is yours. She said it plainly and she meant it plainly and there was nothing conditional anywhere in her voice. He said thank you, and he brought it home, and he put it in a drawer.

That is the whole thing, and it does not get more complicated than that. It was handed over outright. It has been kept like a loan.

So he stands in the cold study with the low sun coming flat through the window and the dust turning slowly over in it, holding a stopped watch and not winding it, because in eighteen years it has never once felt like his to wear.

You know that feeling and yours is shaped differently. There may be no object at all in your version. It may be a house you have lived in for twenty years and kept faintly ready to leave, or a chair at a table that you sit slightly forward on, or a name people use for you that you answer to without ever settling into. And underneath everything you do there is a quiet arithmetic running, and it goes: if they knew, if it came out, if the person who let me in ever changes their mind, all of this could be called back in. Nobody has ever said that to you. You have been saying it to yourself for years, in a voice so low you stopped hearing it as a voice.

I am not going to ask you what your version is. I want to show you a sentence God said to a nation of slaves who owned nothing at all, on the worst week they had ever had.

I am the LORD, and I will redeem you

Exodus 6 arrives at the worst possible moment. Moses has already been to Pharaoh and it has made things worse rather than better. The workload has been doubled. The people have stopped listening to Moses because their spirits are crushed and their bodies are wrecked. And into that room, with nothing improving and nobody encouraged, God speaks a paragraph carrying more first-person verbs than almost anything else in the Torah.

Wherefore say unto the children of Israel, I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will rid you out of their bondage, and I will redeem you with a stretched out arm, and with great judgments.Exodus 6:6

Read what comes first. Not the rescue. The name. I am the LORD, and then the verbs. The whole sentence is fastened at the near end to who He is, and not at the far end to what they had, which was nothing, or to what they had managed, which was survival.

You are purchased outright, and you were never here on anybody's sufferance. I am not laying my own opinion over your life. Scripture says you were bought with a price, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not the force of a sentence, who carries a line like that off a page and into a cold room with an open drawer in it.

Now the word itself, because it is the hinge the whole verse swings on. The Hebrew behind redeem there is the family word. It belongs to a relative with the standing to act: the one who has both the right and the will to step in and take back what has gone out of the family. It is not the language of charity. Charity leaves the giver at a distance and leaves the receiver grateful and slightly outside the door. This word puts the one acting inside the family, and it makes the taking back a matter of belonging rather than a matter of kindness.

Then count the verbs, because not one of them is theirs. I will bring out. I will rid. I will redeem. Every hand in the verse is His hand. There is no clause reading, and you will do your part, and there is nothing anywhere requiring the slaves to make any of it up afterward. You have a Redeemer who named Himself before He named the rescue, and He has not since asked you to carry any part of what it took. It is written in Exodus 6:6 exactly that way, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ancient paragraph land on a living person in the present tense.

Tolerated, or taken

Keep reading one verse further and the reason for all of it comes out. And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God. That is the point of the arm. Not a door held open. A taking.

There is an enormous difference between being let stay and being taken, and you have almost certainly spent your life on the wrong side of it. Being let stay is provisional by nature. There is a person behind it who decided, and a person who decided can decide otherwise, so the one who is let stay learns to be useful, learns to be easy, learns to keep a bag half packed in a place inside where nobody can see it. Being taken has no such machinery in it. It is done, it was done by somebody with the standing to do it, and it does not get re-examined every winter.

You were taken to Him for His own people, and taking is not tolerating. The word says He would take a people to Himself and be their God, and the same Spirit who moved over the writing of that line is the one who settles it into a person who has never once felt settled.

And here is the part that matters most for a man holding a stopped watch. Nothing about Egypt was pretended away. The four hundred years stayed in the book. The bricks, the straw, the river, the whole of it is written down, and it has been read out loud at a table every year since by the descendants of the people it happened to. God did not tidy the record in order to change the verdict. He left the record standing exactly where it was and He changed what it meant about whose they were. That is the shape of this the whole way through. The record stands. The verdict is changed. Both in the same breath, and neither one makes the other a liar.

So the thing being handed back to you here is small and exact, and I would rather name it than talk about redemption in general. It is the right to wear what has your name on it. Not to keep it wrapped, not to guard it, not to hold it in trust for somebody more suitable who might turn up. To wear it, in the street, on an ordinary Tuesday, the way a man wears a watch. You are holding something that was handed over outright, and there is no clause underneath it for anybody to call in. Scripture says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, meaning He does not go back over them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a promise that flat and stops it being theoretical.