The Voicemail You Will Not Delete

One fifteen in the morning and she is out on the back step in a cardigan over her nightclothes, with the porch light off on purpose, because if the light is on the neighbor's dog starts and then somebody upstairs wakes up and asks if she is all right.

The phone is at eight percent. The charger is inside on the counter and she is not going in for it.

She holds it in both hands and she presses the little triangle and it plays.

Fourteen seconds.

Hey, it is me. Nothing important. Ring me back when you get a chance.

That is the whole of it. Fourteen seconds of a Tuesday afternoon, from a car park, or a shop, because there is a noise behind him about four seconds in that she has decided is a trolley going over a curb. He is not saying anything. He is not being profound and he is not saying goodbye and he had no idea, and neither did she, and that is the entire reason it is the only fourteen seconds she has.

And then the pause at the end, before he hangs up. Just under a second. She knows that pause the way she knows her own name.

She plays it again.

She has screenshotted the saved messages list twice in case the phone company clears them out. She has emailed the file to herself, and then emailed it again from the second account because she did not trust the first one. When she changed her carrier last year she sat in that shop for fifty minutes and did not leave until a young man had promised her, twice, that the saved ones would come across.

Somebody said to her at church a fortnight ago, kindly, gently, in the way that people say the worst things, that maybe playing it so much was not helping.

She has not played it in front of another human being since.

The phone says seven percent now. She plays it one more time.

And I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you know the length of yours. You know it in seconds. You know exactly which words and which background noise and where the pause falls, and you know the number of times you have played it this week, and you have not told anybody that number and you are not going to.

And you cannot delete it. You are not going to delete it. And underneath that there is a smaller, colder thing sitting in you that nobody has said out loud, which is the fear that one day the phone breaks or the account lapses and the fourteen seconds go, and you will be the person who lost the last of it.

I am not going to hurry you off this step. Sit down. I will sit here.

Fourteen seconds you know by heart

First, the plain part, and I am not going to move off it quickly.

They are gone. That is the actual fact sitting on the step with you at one in the morning, and there is nothing in this message that makes it smaller, and if anybody has tried to make it smaller for you they were wrong to. I am not going to tell you why it happened. I do not know why it happened, and anybody who tells you they do is guessing at something that costs you too much for guessing.

And I am not going to draw a lesson out of it. Your person was not a lesson. They were a person, and they rang you from a car park about nothing, and now the phone is at seven percent on a back step in the dark.

Now let me take one thing off you, because somebody put it there and it does not belong.

Keeping that message is not a symptom. It is not a sign you are stuck, it is not evidence that you are handling this badly, and it is not a spiritual problem. It is fourteen seconds of the most ordinary voice in the world, and ordinary is exactly what got taken from you. Nobody is grieving the big moments at one in the morning. They are grieving that nobody rings about nothing any more.

You are allowed to keep it. You are allowed to play it tonight. Nobody appointed that person at church, and God did not send them. Psalm 61 was written by a man at the far edge of everything who was never asked to tidy himself up first. The Spirit who has kept that psalm for three thousand years is not out on the back step waiting for you to delete fourteen seconds.

Here is where God actually is in this, and it is nearer than you think.

From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.Psalm 61:2

Look at where the man is standing when he says it. The end of the earth. The far edge, the last bit of ground, as far out as a person can get and still be somewhere. That is not a figure of speech he chose to sound poetic. That is a description of a location, and one fifteen in the morning on a back step with the porch light off is exactly that location.

And look at the state he says he is in. Overwhelmed. The old word underneath it means wrapped, covered over, the way a thing is when it has gone under. He is not managing. He does not claim to be managing, he does not apologize for not managing, and there is not one line in that psalm where he tidies himself up before he speaks.

Then hear what he actually asks for, because this is the part I want in your hands tonight.

He does not ask to be lifted out. He does not ask for it to be explained. He asks to be led.

Lead me to the rock that is higher than I.

Higher than I. Which is an admission, said out loud, that he cannot be his own high ground and cannot get there under his own strength. That is not weakness in the psalm. That is the whole request. He is asking for someone to take him by the arm, and the asking assumes there is somebody close enough to take his arm, and that assumption is not corrected anywhere in the psalm.

That is what is on offer on the step tonight. Not an answer. Not a reason. Not a rearrangement of your loss into something that makes sense.

Company. Somebody sitting on the same cold step at the end of the earth, near enough to lead you when you can move, and content to sit still when you cannot.