The Call You Have Not Made

Wilma has had that name on the screen for about forty minutes, and she has put the phone face down twice.

She is not afraid of that person. That is not what this is, and I want to say so early because a reader will assume it. There is nobody in that relationship who is going to be cruel about anything, and Wilma has known her since they were girls, and if she rang her at three in the morning about anything at all the phone would be answered.

That is precisely the trouble.

Because Wilma has been the other one for forty-one years. She has been the one who is rung. She has taken those calls and made those drives and sat in those kitchens, and she has never once needed anybody to do it back, and there was never any arrangement about that, it simply worked out that way and nobody ever mentioned it.

And now there is a sentence she has to say out loud to that woman, and she cannot get near it.

The sentence is short. It is not complicated. It does not need explaining and it does not need any background at all.

It is just that she has never said anything like it to anybody.

Now hear me before we go one step further, because this is where a message can start doing damage without meaning to.

I am not going to ask you how it happened. Not on this page, not anywhere in it. I do not know whether it was your doing or somebody else's or nobody's, and it makes no difference at all to what I have to say to you, and there is no point in this article where you have to give an account of anything.

And nobody here is going to tell you that this is God teaching you a lesson. I do not know that and neither does anybody else, and people who say that to somebody holding a phone are guessing out loud at that person's expense, and it does harm.

You have your own version. There is a name, and there is a sentence, and you have been looking at both of them for longer than you would like to admit.

Nobody is auditing anything here. You are just holding a phone.

The verse is about proximity, not about your state

There is a line in the Psalms that people quote to the grieving, and the word that carries it is not the emotional one.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Nigh. It is a distance word. It is not a promise about how you are going to feel and it is not a description of a mood, it is a statement about where somebody is standing, and distance is a fact rather than an experience.

Which means it is true in a kitchen at nine in the morning with a phone face down on the table and nothing in a woman that feels remotely like comfort.

And notice who it is aimed at. Not the recovered. Not the ones who have processed it. The broken hearted, in the present tense, at the temperature they are actually at.

And now hear what is already true over you. He is near you now, at exactly the state you are in. That is not my encouragement: the written word puts the nearness with the brokenness rather than after it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that a fact in a room rather than a line on a card.

And nothing about you has been downgraded. The word says nothing shall separate us from the love of God in Christ, and it lists the worst things it can think of and then says none of them, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit that you are a child of God, which is a sentence about family rather than about circumstances.

Your welcome was never priced

Here is the thing that has to be said in this category, and it is the whole reason this set of articles exists.

Nothing about how you are received has ever depended on what was in your hands.

Not by God, and I would say, if I may, probably not by the woman whose name is on that screen either. You have been the one who gets rung for forty-one years, and you have never once weighed anybody who rang you, and it has never occurred to you to.

And your standing has not moved. It did not go up in the good years and it has not gone down now: the word says by grace are ye saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, and the Spirit is the one who makes that hold steady in a body that has just had the ground move.

And the welcome was settled before any of this. The word says while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, which puts the whole arrangement before anybody's best or worst year, and it is the Spirit who makes that land as a fact about you rather than a doctrine about people in general.