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Somewhere a woman is saying to herself: "I have to get out of this marriage. I've married a clod, a lazy slob, who spends all his free hours watching TV football and drinking beer. He never helps with anything around the house. He never talks to me." And then she remembers a vow she made at their wedding to love, honour and cherish until death parted them. She determines to try to put the broken pieces of their marriage together.
Somewhere there is a student who is tempted to cheat, to hand in someone else's term paper. After all, it's a mickey mouse course with no value for what he plans to do in life. Why spend time on a stupid literature paper on King Oedipus? Then he remembers the promise he made at baptism to be a person of integrity and starts work on his own term paper.
Somewhere there is a young woman who is being pressured by her boyfriend to go all the way to prove her love. After all, they love one another, everyone else is doing it, and he will use some protection. Then she remembers a promise made to God and her parents to live with moral integrity and says no.
At the heart of all integrity is the strength of a promise. How can we give our promises integrity? We make promises every day. "I'll have lunch with you on Tuesday" is one kind. Another kind occurs when we give the cashier our credit card. Still another when we ask for a driver's license. And still another when we sign a work contract.
Yet some Christians fail to see these promises in the same category as the promises, or vows, James wrote about: "Above all . . . do not swear--not by heaven or by earth or by anything else. Let your `Yes' be yes and your `No,' no, or you will be condemned" (James 5:12). In our Confession of Faith we relegate these words to formal legal situations, limiting the third commandment's intent. However, no extra words are needed whenever we make a promise, whether it be to a child or to a judge. A promise is still a promise.
The late Lewis B. Smedes has written much about the power of promises. I am indebted to him for some of my ideas.
A promise has power to create and determine the future, Smedes writes. It means taking ourselves off the sidelines and committing ourselves to playing the game.
A man and woman at the marriage altar say to each other that this promise they are making will determine their future. They agree to stick with whomever they are stuck with.
I recall a woman whose husband had Parkinson's disease. When the operation that was to give him new strength failed, he was returned to her in a vegetative state. For 13 years, she looked after him gently, lovingly, although he could not respond. Her promise "for better or for worse" determined her destiny.
When you make a promise to someone, you are exercising your free will. Only free people can make valid promises. A slave or prisoner can't make a promise to work for a new employer next week. A married man or woman can't promise to marry because they are both legally and morally bound to their first spouse.
Yet a challenging aspect of promise-making is that though we exercise freedom when we make a promise, that promise limits our freedom in the future--even if it becomes inconvenient, uncomfortable or difficult. In a promise, you limit the freedom you possess.
The way we keep promises establishes our identity, writes Smedes. While I was teaching at Tabor College, I used to get many requests from prospective employers for references. Students may think they get their main identity from academic achievements or extra-curricular activities such as athletics, drama and music. Teachers also evaluate them by the way they kept their promises.
One small example: I had a student who took an independent study course. The agreement was that she would do her final exam--a take-home test--without reference to her notes or the text. She had a strong academic record and a bright Christian testimony. She aced the test. Much later, I received a note from her: "I cheated on every test. I didn't trust myself to know the material, so I copied." When I think of her, I think of her broken promise, not her brilliant grades, because I wonder how many other times she compromised herself. Can she be trusted in a tight situation?
When you break a promise, you go back on yourself, but you also disappoint others. We can only live together in our families, our congregations, our schools if we can trust people to keep their promises. A school administrator loses the confidence of the academic community and the constituency if he or she makes promises that are not kept. Teachers lose the confidence of students when they state there'll be an open book test and it turns out to be a closed book test. Students lose the confidence of teachers when they promise to show up for classes and then decide to sleep in. Husbands lose the confidence of their wives when their eyes wander to more inviting faces and bodies. Wives lose the confidence of their husbands when their personal interests rise above their promise to stand at their husband's side. Pastors lose the confidence of their congregation if they promise pastoral calls but rarely leave the office. A nation loses confidence in its political system when its politicians break their promises.
Smedes writes that a society collapses when people no longer see their promises as substantial agreements: "Life together survives not on a diet of warm feelings, but on the tough fibers of promise keeping."
I'd like to add a fourth principle. I believe that a promise can be the means of the grace of God entering our lives. People break promises because doing so looks like a short cut to happiness. When a person decides to break a promise, he or she may be crying out in terrible agony: "I am incapable of functioning in this situation. I am a loser. I can't carry on any further."
Just as sin can enter our lives at the moment of crisis, grace can also. Writer Flannery O'Connor's characters reveal repeatedly that they are farthest from grace when they lack the truthful appraisal of their reality. The old woman in A Good Man is Hard to Find cannot accept that she is a sinner. In a brief moment with the Misfit, an escaped criminal, he gives her the opportunity to acknowledge her sinful state. She doesn't, and the moment of grace passes her by. He kills her.
C.H. Spurgeon writes that "Grace is the spending money for travelling expenses on our pilgrimage. It is not our estate." When evaluating our promises, we have many opportunities to spend the money of grace to forgive the painful past and begin again.
Giving our promises integrity is a tough social duty. Letting our yes be yes and our no be no is a tough Christian responsibility--but it is the only redemptive way.
Katie Funk Wiebe is a well-known Mennonite Brethren writer and teacher from Wichita, Kan.
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