The Call That Keeps Moving to December

The rice is going cold on the stove and the phone lies face down beside the salt.

Third name in the list. No scrolling required. It sits between the letting agent and somebody from work, under a word that has not been said out loud in four years, and it has stayed exactly there through two flats and one new handset.

Every year the decision is the same. December is the right month. December is softer. There is a reason to ring in December, a shape to hide the call inside, a greeting that can carry it. A man can talk about the weather first. A man can let the season do half the work.

So the phone goes back down and the year does what a year does. Spring is too ordinary. Summer is too far from anything. Autumn belongs to whatever is happening at work. Then December arrives, and December turns out to be crowded and loud and short, and the number stays where it is, and next Christmas begins to look honestly better, because by then the right opening line will have arrived.

Four Decembers now.

It is not that the call is unwanted. It is that the call is wanted already finished. He would like to walk into it holding the whole conversation, the apology folded neatly, the tone worked out in advance, every possible reply answered before it is spoken. He is not waiting for courage. He is waiting for a script.

And underneath the script sits something smaller and older that never announces itself. While the call is unmade, the silence is a thing that happened. Once the call is made, the silence becomes a thing somebody chose to end, and after that the outcome is in the room with him.

So the rice goes cold, and the salt sits there, and the kitchen light comes up over the tiles the way it does every morning of every year, and nothing about this particular Tuesday looks like the day for it.

Perhaps you know that stove. Perhaps the rice is something else and the name is a different name and the month is a different month, but the arithmetic is one you can recite: it will be easier later, and it has never once been easier.

What if the turn is not the conversation you keep rehearsing, but the four seconds it takes to press the name?

Kindness is doing the leading

Two engines will move a person toward that number, and only one of them belongs to God.

The first is shame. Shame is loud, shame is fast, and shame always wants the grand gesture: ring tonight, say all of it, make the size of the apology match the size of the silence. Shame is not actually interested in the father. Shame is interested in getting the caller out of the room he is standing in.

The second engine is kindness, and it moves differently. Slower. More specific. It never humiliates the person it is leading.

The prophet Joel puts both halves in one line:

And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness.Joel 2:13

Read the order of it. The turning comes first and the reason comes second, and the reason is not a threat hanging over the sentence. It is a description of who God is: gracious, merciful, slow to anger, of great kindness. That is the ground the turn stands on.

You are being led, and you are not being driven. Joel 2:13 sets the kindness of God underneath the turning instead of hanging a deadline over it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not this paragraph, who makes that land on a man in a kitchen at seven in the morning.

Notice also what Joel refuses. Rend the heart, not the garments. The garment is the public gesture, the thing everyone can see, the tearing that proves how sorry a person is. The heart is the actual direction of travel. A man can tear his shirt in front of the whole street and be facing precisely where he was facing before.

That is why a turn can be four seconds long and completely real.

You have permission to make the smallest true turn available to you today. Scripture never measures a return by its drama, and the promised mercy in Joel is attached to the heart that turns rather than to the size of the display, and His Spirit is well able to carry a small honest movement further than a large performed one.

Waiting for a script

The rehearsal deserves a proper look, because it is the reason four Decembers went by.

A rehearsed call is an attempt to control a conversation before it starts. Every line is drafted so that no answer can surprise anybody. Every possible reply gets a prepared response. The whole apparatus exists to make the call safe, and the price of that safety is that the call never happens, because no script is ever finished. There is always one more scenario to cover.

That rehearsal has no right to stay in your calendar. What is written stands against it plainly, because Scripture calls this the day and not the year after next, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from a rehearsal into a room.

Here is what this message will not do, and the refusal matters.

It will not tell you what your father says when he picks up. It will not tell you that he is waiting by the phone, or that he is not. It will not promise you a warm answer, a long conversation, or any conversation at all. The response is not yours to write, and it never was. Another person's will is not a mountain that authority was ever given over, and any message handing out a predicted outcome has handed the reader a second thing to be afraid of.

The turn belongs to you. The reception does not.

So the blessing goes one way and the command goes the other. You bless your father, freely, with no conditions attached to the blessing. You command your own delay, because the delay is the only thing in this kitchen that is actually under your authority.

You were not handed a spirit of fear for this. It stands written in 2 Timothy 1:7 that what was given instead is power and love and a sound mind, and the Spirit who carries that sentence into a person's chest is the same Spirit steadying a hand over a phone.