Good morning church family,
“I’m sorry,” the disembodied voice on the other end of the line begins, “but the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet. Please try again later. Goodbye.”
When she’s done giving me the bad news – and it’s always a woman’s voice that’s dispatched to do such a thing – she calmly and dispassionately hangs up on me. I take the phone away from my ear and look dumbly at the screen, the way a child looks at his mommy when his balloon floats away or when his ice cream falls out of the cone and onto the pavement. But my phone, like my mommy, only looks back at me blankly.
“Well,” I console myself, “at least they can see that I called. And – like she said – I can always try again later.”
I decide to place another call to another person. It rings and rings.
“I’m sorry,” the same female cyborg answers, “but the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that is full and cannot receive any more messages. Please try again later. Goodbye.”
In olden days I would have just put the handset back into its cradle on the wall, watched the cord twirl up in a bunch underneath, and walked merrily away. But now I just stare into the backlit abyss that is my smartphone; waiting for some notification to give me direction.
“I suppose I could send a text message,” I suggest to myself – a grimace appearing on my face. “I mean, they’ll see that I called but because I didn’t leave a voicemail – they won’t think it’s important. They’ll never call back.”
With a sigh of resignation, I open the text messaging app on my phone. “What I wouldn’t give for a piece of parchment, a quill pen, and an ink well right now,” I say to myself. “I’d scratch out a neat and tidy note with as elegant a hand as possible, nobly review the composition as the ink dries, bend the correspondence into a trifold crease, pour a dollop of hot wax over the fold, and carefully affix my seal into the wax. I’d then ring for my manservant who would ably dispatch a courier to deliver the message. Then, with the happy sound of the courier’s horse galloping away from my courtyard, I would return to the silent reverie of my study.”
Putting fantasy aside, I begin writing out the first text message. I labor over the introduction. Should I use “hey”, “hello”, or some other greeting? Should I use the person’s name? Would an exclamation mark be over the top? A comma be too formal? What about a smiley face emoji? Ugh – I hate it. Then there’s the body of the message to fool with. I prefer complete sentences and a strict adherence to grammatical standards but in the texting medium this feels something like wearing a suit and tie to a barbecue. So, I settle on the grammatical equivalent of business-casual – the jeans and untucked collared shirt of contractions, colloquialisms, and fragments. Brutal. Finally, there’s the conclusion to write. My instinct is to always give a proper benediction at the end of any message but, because texting is more akin to conversation than correspondence, a grand goodbye could appear as though I’m stiff-arming any future reply – I just sat down to dinner and I’m already standing up and putting my coat on to leave. But despite all these tortured ruminations, I manage to muddle through and prepare something for the send button.
As my clumsy thumbs are busy tapping it all out, the Lord looks over my shoulder and shares a thought with me. What He has to say isn’t the type of thing that demands my full attention – He’s happy to have me multitask as we talk. “Have you checked your voicemail box recently?” He says, perhaps trying to check some of my frustration and bring in a little humility.
“Hmm,” I utter my acknowledgement with a slight nod of the head, “that’s a good thought, I don’t remember clearing out my box anytime recently. I should do that.”
“I’m not talking about your phone, John,” the Lord says with crisper tone.
I don’t know about you, but when I get alone with the Lord – when I’m intentionally setting aside some “face to face” time, as it were – both God and I seem to have an agenda. I have things I want to share, vent about, and fellowship in. I usually have requests to make and I often seek some guidance of some kind. Sometimes all I really want is to enjoy the Lord’s company and be blessed by some of His undivided attention. God is so loving and patient – He almost always allows me to go through my entire agenda with Him. But, as I said, He almost always has things He wants to do and accomplish as well. He often begins His portion of our meeting by reviewing old business – things that we’d discussed in previous meetings and which I’d promised to take care of. I know this is coming and I try to have taken action lest I spend the entire time squirming. There are usually some words of encouragement and some new business too – things He’d like for me to begin aligning my heart, mind, and energies with. But the agenda item that He’s most sure to cover is the one that deals with necessary areas of correction in my life. He’s faithful to point out for me things that He’s unhappy with and that I need to change.
I suddenly realize that this is what God is referring to when He asks about my “voicemail box”. It didn’t happen overnight and I wasn’t even entirely conscious of it at first; but I had begun managing my times alone with the Lord in such a way that He wasn’t afforded the opportunity to chasten and discipline me anymore. For instance, I adopted a blanket confession of sin that I would make at the beginning of each of our meetings. This was heartfelt actually and usually accompanied by a sincerely penitent bending of the knee. “That ought to cover it,” I’d assure myself. I also began only allowing a proxy to cover most of the Lord’s agenda – restricting His voice to Scriptures of my own choosing and readings of His saints that serve only to provide glancing blows here and there. But, as moderator, I was careful to make sure the meeting passed at such a pace that the Spirit was never allowed the floor. Awful. But perhaps the most underhanded of all my changes was the way I began scheduling our times together with a hard break at the end. I have a 9 o’clock appointment, let’s say, and so I begin my time with God at 8:45. There’s just enough time for my items and, “Oops, we’ll have to circle back on anything You might want to bring up later, Lord.”
But of course, “later” almost never comes. And now my voicemail box is full of important messages that I haven’t listened to and I’ve changed my quiet time in such a way so as to disable the function of Heavenly messaging altogether. This is how you end up having prophets coming to you with stories about pet lambs and such and how you end up with matted hair that looks like feathers, fingernails as long as claws, and grass stuck between your teeth.
So, I put my phone down and look God in the eye again. Thankfully – mercifully – the call comes through.
What a wonderful blessing from God is the family of God! God wouldn’t have any of His children be orphans in this world but ensures that each is given a home to belong to, to be nurtured in, and to blessed by. And what a wonderful home is ours! I look forward to a rollicking time in the living room tomorrow morning! Until then – may the Lord, mighty God, bless and continue to keep us!
- Pastor Tate
