The Pause on the Line

The phone is warm against her ear because she has been holding it too long on one side.

It is the last week of September, the first evening cool enough to matter, and she is standing in the hall at the bottom of the stairs with a basket of towels on her hip. Her mother is telling her about the dentist. Her mother has already told her about the dentist, on Sunday, and again on Monday, and now it is Thursday and here is the dentist again, the appointment card, the parking, the girl at the desk who was so nice.

And she hears her own voice come out flat and hard. "You told me. You have told me three times."

Then the pause.

It is not long. Two seconds, maybe less. Just the sound of a phone line with nobody talking on it, the tiny hiss underneath, and somewhere behind her mother the television going in the other room. Two seconds.

Then her mother says, brightly, the way she says everything, "Well. All right, honey."

And she says she has to go, and she goes.

She sets the basket down on the third stair and does not fold it. She goes out the back door instead and sits on the steps in the dark with the door open behind her so the light falls across her knees. There are crickets. There is a smell of somebody's cut grass from the afternoon. Her neighbor's kitchen window is yellow across the fence.

It is the third time this week.

That is what she is sitting out here with. Not the dentist, and not the towels. The third time this week, and the pause, which she can still hear, and which she will hear again at two in the morning when the house is quiet and she is running the tape.

She wants to be clear with herself, sitting on the steps, so she is. She is not confused about whose voice that was, and she is not going to blame the day she had, or the towels. Her mother is seventy-nine and the phone call is the good part of her mother's Thursday.

She would like this to stop. Not in a general way. Not as a thing to work on. She would like it to stop before the next phone call, because there is a woman in another house who put the phone down tonight and said, well, all right, honey, into a room with a television in it.

And you know why you are reading this instead of something else. Somebody is on the receiving end of a thing in you, and you would like it out of you tonight, and you have already tried the ways you know.

The pause is the part you cannot unhear

I want to stay out here on the steps a minute before I say anything about God, because the thing in your hands deserves that much.

The pause is not imagination and it is not being dramatic. Anybody who has been on the other end of a phone has made that sound. It is the two seconds a person takes to decide not to say the thing they were about to say. It is somebody absorbing the blow. And it lands so hard because it was quiet, and quiet from a person who loves you is the loudest correction there is.

And I am not going to tell you it was fine. It was not fine, and telling you it was fine would be a comfort with nothing in it, and you would lean your weight on it later and it would give.

But here is the thing I am not going to do either, and I want you to hear me refuse it out loud. I am not going to stand at the bottom of your stairs with a clipboard. You are not being assessed tonight. There is no version of this page where I tell you what your temper says about your walk with God, or how far along you should be after all these years.

Psalm 103 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and the Spirit takes what is written there and makes it living on a back step instead of leaving it a nice idea about somebody else.

You are held by God in the exact second after you snapped, and that second is where He starts. Not the improved second afterward. That one.

And He was not listening in from a distance while it happened. He was on the line, both ends of it, in the hall and in the room with the television going.

You have been heard tonight by the One who was on both ends of that call. Psalm 139 says He is acquainted with all our ways and that the darkness and the light are both alike to Him, and it is the Spirit who lets a person be that known without running, so nothing about tonight has to be edited before it is brought.

He does not begin with a better plan for Thursday

Now, the honest question. You want it out of you now. So where does now actually go?

Most of us take it to a program. A new discipline. A verse taped somewhere. A promise made on the steps that this is the last time, and the promise is sincere, and it holds until the third phone call. I have made that promise, in a stairwell, with my hand on the rail.

Here is what David says instead, and notice that there is no plan anywhere in it.

He brought me up also out of an horrible pit, out of the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established my goings.Psalm 40:2

Count the verbs and count whose they are. He brought up. He set. He established. There is nothing in that sentence a man in a pit does, and anybody who has stood in miry clay knows why: clay gives you nothing to push against. That is what makes it clay. The man in the pit is not lazy. He is in clay.

You are already in the hands of the One who reached down, and the reaching was never a reward for climbing. The written word puts every verb in that verse on Him, and the lifting in a real week in a real hallway belongs to His Spirit, so the way out of the clay is not a better foothold.

I know that can sound like being told to wait, and I am not telling you to wait. Waiting is not what this is. Handing something over is an action, and it takes about nine seconds, and it can be done sitting on a step in the dark with a basket of towels unfolded on the stairs behind you.

You have tonight, and tonight is where He begins. Scripture says today, if you will hear his voice, and the same Scripture names the Spirit as the one still saying it, which means the door is not on a schedule and it is not down the road.

I am not going to tell you how fast. I do not know, and anybody who tells you is selling something. What I know is where it starts, and it starts where you are, tonight, before you improve.

When it is landing on somebody

Now the part I will not soften, because somebody is on the other end of this.

If what is in you is landing on another person, then the repair is part of the work and not an extra credit item. Say the plain sentence. Not the explanation, not the day you had, not the three times about the dentist. "I was short with you and I am sorry." That is the whole sentence. It does not need a because.

And a human being brought alongside you belongs to this work rather than standing in for it. A doctor, because a body running on no sleep, or carrying something physical nobody has looked at yet, hands you a temper you never ordered. A counselor, who can sit with the thing under the thing for as long as getting down to it takes. A pastor. The one friend who hears it without the edit. If anybody in your house is being hurt, do not keep that in the dark on your own: tell a real person this week. And when the hours after midnight quit being about the phone call and turn into wondering whether the people on the other end of it would breathe easier without you, make the call tonight instead of tomorrow. 988 takes a text, and a crisis line will stay with you as long as the night runs.

You were never handed this to carry by yourself, and the help is not a detour around God. Galatians 6 says we bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ, and His Spirit moves through ordinary people who have phone numbers and waiting rooms, so a counselor's office is not a lesser room than a prayer meeting.