The Name on the Deed

The safe is in the vestry and it has not been properly emptied since before Godfrey was born.

He is seventy-six and he has been the one who does the paperwork for that building since he was forty-one, which was not a decision anybody made, it was just that nobody else would.

And in the safe, under the insurance and the boiler certificates and a bundle of orders of service from the sixties, there is the deed.

And on the deed there is a name.

It is not the name that is over the door. It is not the name on the noticeboard, or the sign at the end of the road, or the letterhead, or the little printed cards for the Christmas services.

The name on the deed is the name that congregation had before a particular year, when it stopped being one congregation and became two, and the other one kept a version of the original and this one took a new one, and the deed was never amended because amending it would have cost money and there was no money and it did not matter.

Godfrey has known this since 1991.

He has told two people. One is dead and the other moved away and has dementia now.

He is not concealing it. He would give you the deed if you asked. It is not a secret, it is simply that nobody asks, and the last person who might have asked out of interest died in about 2009.

And the thing that has started keeping him awake is not the deed.

It is that he is the only one left who knows why it changed.

Not the official version, which is in a book and which is accurate as far as it goes. The actual reason, the shape of it, the two men and what was said in a back room and who was owed money and which of them had a son who was ill at the time.

He heard it, whole, in 1991, from a man who was ninety-one and who told him in a way that suggested he was handing something over rather than gossiping.

And Godfrey has never handed it to anybody.

And you may be holding something like that. Not a secret. Just the last copy of something, in one head, with nobody asking.

Proverbs is exact about what concealing does and what confessing finds

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it since 1991 and it was never yours to carry alone.

You are not the archive. You never were. Scripture puts concealing and confessing side by side in one line and tells you plainly what each one produces, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the last man with the story, who keeps a thing alive properly. Set it down here in this vestry. It is heavy and it has been in a safe with the boiler certificates.

Now hear it, and hear how short it is.

Whoever conceals their sins does not prosper, but the one who confesses and renounces them finds mercy.Proverbs 28:13

Finds mercy.

That is the outcome attached to the saying, and it is not attached to the analysis or to the setting straight of the record. It comes to somebody who says the thing.

And notice the first half is not about lying. Conceal is a quieter word than that. You can conceal something by simply never being asked and never volunteering, for thirty-five years, in a vestry, with all the paperwork in perfectly good order.

Mercy is what is found when it is said. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who carries a thing when the last man who knows it lets go, and He has never once needed one old man to hold it alone.

Now let me be careful here, because there are ditches on both sides and I have no intention of putting you in either.

Nothing here says the men in that back room were wicked. They were not. One of them had a son who was ill, and both of them wanted the same church their fathers had wanted, and Scripture would have you know that people under that kind of weight do things they would not do on a good day.

And nothing here says the other congregation carries the fault. It does not, and their version of that year is in a safe of their own, and I will not sort a family into a right half and a wrong half and neither does the verse.

The point is only about what a thing does while it sits unsaid, and Scripture says concealing does not prosper, and His Spirit is the one who meets a man in the saying.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The old man in 1991 was not gossiping and you knew that at the time.

He was handing something over, the way you hand over a key, and he did it because a thing that is only in one head is one funeral away from being lost. His Spirit was in that handing and He has never once asked you to be the end of the line.