The Handshake You Did Not Mean

It was a good handshake, and Cal knew it was a lie about a second and a half before his hand came up.

That is the detail he cannot get past. Not the thing he agreed to, which was honestly not the crime of the century. The second and a half. There was time. There was time to say the thing, there was time to say wait, hold on, I do not actually see it that way, and he stood there in that second and a half and did the arithmetic and then he put his hand out.

It was not money. I want to say that early because most folks assume it is, and it almost never is.

What it would have cost him was a month. An awkward month. A month of being the difficult one at the table, of somebody making a joke that had an edge on it, of two people going quiet when he walked over. He is fifty-eight years old and he has had a few of those months in his life and he knows exactly what they taste like, and standing there with his hand halfway up he decided, without ever putting it into words, that he did not have another one in him this year.

So he shook. And everybody was pleased. And it went the way it was always going to go.

And Cal drove home down a road he has driven eleven thousand times and could not have told you a single thing he passed.

Now here is the part I want to be careful about, because if I get this wrong I hurt somebody.

Cal is not a coward. He has stood up in his life. He has taken the awkward month more than once, and it cost him, and he has the marks of it. That is exactly why this one landed so hard: he was not discovering a weakness, he was discovering a tiredness, and a tired man is not a bad man.

And nothing dramatic happened. Nobody was defrauded. The thing he agreed to was not wicked and probably was not even wrong. If you laid it all out in front of a fair-minded person they would say it was a small matter, and they would be right, and Cal would agree with them, and it would still be sitting on him at four in the morning.

Because the size of the thing is not what makes a sale a sale.

What makes it a sale is that a man put a price on his own word and found it affordable.

You have your own version. It might be a nod in a meeting, or a laugh at something that was not funny, or a silence at a table where somebody was being talked about, or a form you signed that said a thing you would not say out loud. And you know the price. You knew it in the moment. It was not money either. It was an awkward month, or an awkward hour, or one uncomfortable look from somebody whose good opinion you had not realized you were renting.

Nobody is calling you dishonest. Nothing about you is on trial here.

Something was sold, and the price was so ordinary that it never once looked like a price.

The oldest trap has a name and it is not weakness

There is a proverb about this and it does not call anybody a coward.

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe.Proverbs 29:25

A snare. Not a sin, first of all, and not a character flaw. A snare is a thing set in a path that catches a good animal doing an ordinary thing, and the animal is not stupid and is not wicked and did not see it, and that is the whole nature of a snare.

So the first thing to hear is that this happened to you the way a snare happens to somebody, and the man who wrote that line was not sneering at anybody when he wrote it.

And hear what is already true over you, standing right there. You are safe. That is the second half of the same verse, and it is not a promise about the awkward month, it is a statement about where a man is standing: the written word says the one who trusts the Lord is set on high, out of reach, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that settle into a man driving home on a road he cannot remember.

And your word has not been destroyed by this. That is not me being soft with you. The word says that if we confess, He is faithful and just to forgive and to cleanse, and the Spirit is the one who does the cleansing, so a handshake at a gate does not get to be the last thing anybody says about your integrity, least of all you.

What is not being asked of you

Now I am going to be very plain, because this is the paragraph where a message like this can cost a man something the writer never has to pay, and I have watched that happen and I will not do it.

Nobody is telling you to go back and reopen it. Nobody here is telling you to make a call tomorrow, or write a letter, or stand up at the next table and correct the record, or resign anything. I do not know your situation. I do not know who leans on your income or what a reopened conversation would do to a household that has nothing to do with me.

There may be something to go back and say. There may not be. That is between you and God and I am not going to pretend from here that I can tell which.

And I am not naming your trade or your table either, because there is nothing wrong with your line of work. The snare is not set in one industry. It is set in every place two human beings have ever had to sit down together and want to be liked.

So hear what is not required. You do not have to earn your way back. Nothing in Scripture puts a man on probation over a handshake, and the Spirit of God has never handed anybody a sentence to serve before He would speak to them again.

And you are not going to be dropped for this. He remembers we are dust, says the written word, and that is not an excuse offered on your behalf, it is God's own account of what He knows about the people He keeps.