I Taught Myself Not To Wait By The Phone

For about a year, you ate your evening meal within reach of it.

Not obviously. You would not have described it that way and nobody in the house noticed, because a man can put a phone on the table beside a plate and it looks like nothing at all.

But the whole meal happened at a particular pitch. And when it got past a certain hour and nothing had come, something in you went down half a step, and then you would clear the plates and be perfectly good company for the rest of the evening.

Three hundred and some evenings of that.

And then you trained it out of yourself.

You did it deliberately, which is the part I want to honor. You put the phone in the other room. Then you started leaving it face down. Then you got to where you could hear it go and finish the sentence you were in before you looked.

And now you do not wait. You genuinely do not. A whole evening goes by and it does not cross your mind, and if somebody asked you, you would say you had made your peace with it.

Except that you have not stopped wanting it, and you know the difference, and about once a month something happens that shows you the difference and then you put it away again.

Before anything else, listen to me.

I am not correcting you.

What you did was necessary and it was not faithless. A man cannot spend three hundred evenings at that pitch and stay standing, and I am not going to suggest that the training was a retreat from God, and I am certainly not going to tell you that the call has not come because you stopped expecting it.

I am saying I know what the training cost. That is all.

What the soul is told to wait on

Here is a man telling his own soul what to do, which is an unusual thing to overhear.

My soul, wait thou only upon God; for my expectation is from him. He only is my rock and my salvation: he is my defence; I shall not be moved.Psalm 62:5-6

Look at the small word he puts in twice. Only.

Wait thou only upon God. He only is my rock. He is not saying wait for nothing else to happen. He is saying that the waiting itself has one address, and he is correcting his own soul because a soul will attach its waiting to whatever is nearest.

And notice what he is not doing. He is not telling himself that the thing he wants is going to arrive. There is no forecast anywhere in that psalm. What he does is move the weight of the waiting off the outcome and onto a rock, and then he says I shall not be moved, which is a statement about his footing rather than about his circumstances.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, at your own table.

You are on a rock that does not depend on that phone. Not one day, not when it finally goes, not once somebody on the other side of the world decides something. Right now, on an ordinary evening with the plates going out, you are standing on what the psalm calls a defense, and the psalm was written by somebody who had no idea how his own situation would land. That is not my comfort to you. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real man at a real table.

Now, here is what I actually want to say, and it is the hardest sentence in this piece.

The training was not wrong. But it moved two things at once, and you only meant to move one.

You meant to move the phone. What went with it was the expecting, and the psalmist has a word for expecting and he does not treat it as a liability. My expectation is from him. He keeps it. He just relocates where it comes from.

That is not the same thing as sitting by a phone, and you have not been offered the difference before, so you did the only thing available, which was to put the whole apparatus in the other room.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You have an expectation that does not have to live next to a handset, and moving it does not mean losing it. The word says my expectation is from him, which locates the source rather than naming the delivery, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise into a real evening in a real house.

You can want it again without going back to that pitch. Those are two different rooms and nobody told you.