The Making and Keeping of Commitments By Lewis B. Smedes

Chapter 1 - What do I do when I make a commitment?


What do I do when I make a commitment to someone?

I make an appointment with someone, for some unrestricted time, sometime in his tomorrows, and all
the tomorrows that follow all his yesterdays, tomorrows that neither of us can predict.
I stretch myself into a future neither of us can see, and I plan a rendezvous there with him, and ask him
to trust me to be there.
I reach into the unpredictable times ahead and make one thing predictable; I will be there with him.

I throw myself into the turbulent ocean of his uncertainties and create an island of certainty there for

him, the certainty of my caring presence.

I create one small space for him to have when all his foundations shake, the space of my promised

presence.

These are a few of the things I do when I make a commitment.
But let us stand back a bit and take a longer look.
We have a mystery on our hands, no doubt; Gabriel Marcel was right when he called it that,1 the
mystery of a will that in the face of a universe of contingencies makes one thing incontingent. But an
even greater mystery is this: why should anyone do it? Why would anyone or why should anyone bond
himself or herself so unconditionally to someone in the face of the unknown?
For one thing, after I commit myself, I shall change. I shall be another person one day, different from
the person who makes the commitment today. Yet, when I become that other, that different person, I
intend to be bound by the commitment that this present person is making today.
So, in one bold sense, I am expecting another person to keep the commitment I make today.
The same goes for you, when I commit myself to you. You will not be the same person in the future
that you are today, either. But I am making a commitment to you as you are today that I will be there
with you, whoever you turn out to be tomorrow.
It is the personal changes we pass through on our pilgrimage that make our willingness to make and our
power to keep commitments such a mystery.
And a gamble, too. How can we promise ourselves for the future when we don’t know, cannot know,
what sorts of persons we will be then? Or what life will be like in the time ahead, when the
commitment we made once feels like choking smoke of regretted words after the fire of intention has
died?
But, looking at it another way, the fact that we change is probably why commitment was invented.
Commitments are the only way for free persons to batten down their lives a little, give them some
permanence, some stability in the midst of change—to keep them from being blown away by shifts in
the breezes of mood and the blustery blows of passion. Commitments are one way to put some muscle
into our human relationships, give them some strength to tough out the hard times, ride out the stormy
times. Commitment lifts life a niche beyond impulse, whim, desire, drive, lust, and all the other natural
inclinations that make human relationships so rhapsodic and so painfully unstable.
Change and uncertainty create the problem. Commitment is our surprising solution.