The Third Call

The first time you rang, it went to the recording. You left a long message and you were careful with it, and you sat with the phone in your hand afterwards for a while.

The second time was about four months later. It rang out. No recording that time, which meant somebody had gone in and turned it off.

The third time, you did not leave anything. You listened to it ring the whole way through, and then you put the phone face down on the table, and you finished your tea, and you went out to see about the water.

And that was the last time.

You did not decide anything. There was no evening where you sat down and concluded that God was not going to move on this one. You simply stopped bringing him up.

He was in every prayer you prayed for eleven years and then he was not in any of them, and the change happened somewhere in the weeks after the third call, and nobody noticed, including you, until quite recently.

He is still your cousin. That has not changed and it is not going to. You still hear about him from the family that still hears from him. You still think about him constantly, which is a different thing from praying about him, and you have known the difference for a while now.

Listen to me before anything else.

I am not correcting you.

There is no failure in this. I have not caught you being faithless and I am not going to imply that the silence on the other end has anything at all to do with the silence on yours.

I am saying I know which call it was. That is all.

What a delay is not

Here is a line God gave a man who was tired of asking about something.

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.Habakkuk 2:3

Look at the strange thing in it. Though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry.

It says both. It says the thing tarries and it says the thing does not tarry, in one sentence, without embarrassment. From where the man is standing there is a delay and God does not deny it. From where God is standing there is an appointed time and nothing is late.

Habakkuk is not told that he was wrong to feel the delay. He is told what the delay is and what it is not.

So here it is, said directly to you, out by the water with your sleeves rolled.

You are not reading a verdict. Not one day, not once something changes, not when the phone finally goes a different way. Right now, standing where you are standing, you are inside a text that names the tarrying and refuses to let it mean abandonment, and it was written for a man who was asking about somebody. That is not my comfort to you. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real man on a real morning.

Now, why did the asking stop after the third one?

Because three is the number at which a person's body starts to make a judgment on their behalf. The first silence is an event. The second is a coincidence. The third stops being information and becomes a pattern, and once a thing is a pattern the mind files it and stops presenting it for review.

That is not unbelief. That is a nervous system doing exactly what it was built to do, and it happens to good men in good houses who have never once doubted the character of God.

But look at what the silence on the other end can and cannot tell you. It can tell you that a man did not pick up a telephone. That is the entire contents of the information. It cannot tell you what God has been doing in that man for three years, and it cannot tell you the appointed time, and it certainly cannot tell you whether the request is still open.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have not been dropped from the conversation, and neither has he. The word says at the end it shall speak, and not lie, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise across three years of a phone that nobody answers.

An unanswered call is not an answer. It has never once been an answer. It is a phone.