Eleven Days of Not Making the Call

Eight fifty two in the morning, and the kettle has already boiled twice.

The receipt is on the counter, folded into a small square, softened at the creases the way paper goes when it has been opened and closed a hundred times. A petrol station receipt, of all things. The number is written across the back of it in blue ink, in her own handwriting, from the day somebody read it out to her and she had nothing else to write on.

She unlocks the phone. She types the number in, all of it, and she is good at this part now, she can do it without looking at the receipt at all. The green button sits there under her thumb. The clock at the top of the screen says eight fifty three.

She locks the phone and puts it face down beside the sugar.

That is day eleven.

Day one had a reason, and it was a good one. She was tired, it was late in the afternoon by the time she found the number, and nobody makes a call like that at ten past four. Day two had a reason too. So did day three. By day six the reasons had become a kind of small machinery that ran itself before she was properly awake, and by day nine she had stopped bothering to build them, because she knew she was not going to and she was too tired to argue with herself about it in the kitchen at ten to nine in the morning.

She has rehearsed the opening sentence more times than she could count. In the car. In the shower. Lying flat on her back at three in the morning with her heart going. She has a version that is short and a version that explains, and she has practiced how she will keep her voice level, and none of that is the problem. She could say it perfectly. She knows she could.

The problem is that after the sentence, someone answers, and after that it becomes real, and right now it is not real. Right now it is a phone number on the back of a receipt, and while it is only that, everything on the other side of it is still just possible.

You have your own receipt.

Yours might be a name in your contacts you scroll past on purpose, or a number on a letter, or a person you have not spoken to since something happened that neither of you will name. You have your own morning, and your own hour, and your own small window when you could do it and do not. And by now the delay has grown its own second layer, which is worse than the first, because now you are not only afraid of the call, you are ashamed of how long you have taken. So each day costs more than the one before it, and the thing you cannot say to anybody is that a fully grown adult has been beaten by ninety seconds, eleven mornings in a row.

Your body is not accusing you

Let me take one thing off you before I say anything else, because you have been carrying it for eleven days and it does not belong to you. Joshua 1:9 hands courage to a man who was frightened, not to a man who had finished being frightened, and the Spirit of God has been in that kitchen at eight fifty two on every one of those eleven mornings, standing on your side of the counter.

The dread you feel at eight fifty two is not a verdict on your faith. It is not evidence of anything about your walk with God, your trust, your maturity, or your love for whoever is on the other end of that number. Your body is not accusing you. Your body is doing its job, badly, with old information.

Somewhere behind you there was a phone call that went wrong. Or a conversation that changed everything. Or a room you walked into as one person and left as another. Your body filed it, the way bodies do, and it does not file the details, it files the shape. Phone in hand plus important plus unknown answer equals danger. And now every time your thumb goes near that green button, an alarm goes off that was set a long time ago by something that has already happened and is not happening now.

An alarm is not a prophecy. It is a memory with a bell on it.

So we are not going to spend one minute on why you are afraid, and we are certainly not going to treat the fear as a failure that has to be repented of before you are allowed to pick up the phone. That is not how God has ever worked with frightened people, and there is a man in Scripture who is the proof of it. His Spirit has never once charged a steady hand as the price of admission.

Joshua had just buried Moses. The greatest leader anyone in that camp had ever known was gone, and Joshua now had his job, a river in front of him, and about two million people watching to see whether he could do it. And God did not say to him, do not be afraid, as a rebuke. He commanded courage, and then he told him why it was available.

Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.Joshua 1:9

Read the last six words again. Wherever you go.

Not wherever you go once you feel ready. Not wherever you go if you can get your hands to stop. The whole weight of that sentence sits on the last clause, and the last clause is not about Joshua at all. It is about who is going with him.

That is the ground you stand on. Not your steadiness. Not your track record with hard conversations. God with you, into the room, into the ninety seconds, into the answer, whatever the answer is.

And notice that God said it to him more than once in the same conversation. Three times in a handful of verses, be strong, be courageous. Nobody says a thing three times to a man who has already got it. He said it again because Joshua needed it again, and needing it again was not held against him.

You have needed it eleven mornings. It has not been held against you once. Three times to Joshua is not impatience, it is the shape of how the word speaks to frightened people, and His Spirit says it again over a phone lying face down beside the sugar.