Broken Promises

 I promised my fiancee I'd have abs about 6 years ago. It was one of those, "oh yeah? I'll prove I can do it" statements that so often you never quite live down. Well here we are 6 years later, I'm still a chubby deer and she the agile doe gracefully slowing down until I catch up. 

I'm reflecting on broken promises as I have already failed to keep my streak of Easter promises. I have not written, or exercised every day of the season but luckily have finished the Divine Mercy novena and I pray God forgives my breaking this other promise. 

I suppose there are two kinds of promises: the trivial and the important. Trivial promises are small ones that break easily and are made to be broken. As Mary Poppins calls them, "pie crust promises: easily made, easily broken". This is my abs and my eating healthier and all those stacks of unfinished screenplays and stopped a week into January New Years resolutions. They exist but are fleeting and flawed and never going to be perfect. In a way, they are our most human promises.

The other kind are different. They are inportant and life changing. These are the big ones- vows, trust, love. Promises, spoken or unspoken that are promised out of love for another person- for it is only in loving another person that we truly can change I think. In the promise we give them, we are transformed by the hope of a new future, closer and more intimate to the beloved. 

This is our identity as Christians, a promised people. We are made new in Christ with our baptismal promises. When we sin we decide to turn against our beloved, against our promise, and against ourselves. And in denying that we sin, or explaining that sin away to ourselves, we actually devolve as people in an attempt to slide back to our old  state before the promise. What we fail to realize is that that is not possible. There is no going back once that promise is made, we are already a new being and cannot become the old self for that part of you has died. We live only in this new promise, a betrothal between God and His church. 

All this is to say, while I may never have the abs I promised, the vows I make on my wedding day will infinitely strengthen me more than any crunches or planks. Gof love you ,