Sick Before The Phone Call

The number is written on the back of an envelope, in pen, in her own handwriting, and she has known it since she was eleven years old.

She wrote it down anyway. That is the kind of morning it has been.

The stove clock says 1:50. The call is at three.

The phone is face down on the table by her elbow, and it has been face down since half past twelve, because face up it looks like it is about to do something.

There is toast on a plate at the other end of the table. She made it at one because a person ought to eat, and the butter has gone shiny and cold and set, and she has not touched it, and she is not going to.

Her hands are cold to the second knuckle. Her stomach turned over somewhere around a quarter past one and it has not turned back. She has been to the bathroom twice. The dog has watched her cross the kitchen four times and has stopped lifting his head.

Nothing is happening. That is the maddening part. She is a woman sitting at a table in her own kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday with a slice of cold toast, and her body is behaving as though a truck were coming through the wall.

The call is to her brother. It is about their mother, and the eight months of Tuesdays, and the thing she has to finally say out loud, which is that she cannot keep doing this on her own and she is not going to pretend anymore that she can.

Nine days she has been going to make this call. Nine days of not making it, and every one of those days her body has stood up an hour early and got sick on her behalf.

1:52.

She thinks about pushing it to Thursday, and the relief that comes with the thought is so warm and so immediate that it frightens her more than the call does, because she knows exactly what Thursday is. Thursday is nine days again.

She puts her hand flat on the table just to feel something that is not moving.

The refrigerator hums. The dog sighs. The clock on the stove goes to 1:53, which is not a sound but somehow she hears it.

And there is the whole scene: a good woman, a kind woman, a woman who has driven four hundred miles a month for her mother, sitting cold-handed over uneaten toast, waiting to be brave at three o'clock.

That is you, at your own table.

Yours may be a doctor's office you have to ring, or a landlord, or a friend you went quiet on and have to explain yourself to, or the school. It may be the call where you say the true thing at last. And an hour out, maybe two, your stomach knows before you do, and by the time you pick up the phone you have already been through something.

Say this plainly first, before anything else. That sickness is not a failure of faith. It is not a spiritual weakness and it is not evidence of anything wrong between you and God. A body that goes cold an hour early is not a body that trusts God less than the calm person down the road, and nobody in heaven thinks less of you at ten minutes to two.

The body got there first

God says this to a man who has just been handed something enormous, and He says a version of it three times in the same chapter.

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

Nobody tells a man three times to be strong unless the man is not feeling strong. That is the first thing in this verse, and it is the kindest. God is not talking to a hero here. He is talking to somebody whose insides have already turned over, and read it as slowly as you like, you will not find one word of shame anywhere in it.

Then look at what the command actually rests on. Not be courageous, because you are the courageous type. Not be strong, because your hands are steady. The reason is bolted on at the end and it is a Person: for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.

You are not being asked to produce courage out of your own stomach. The strength named there is not a temperament you either have or do not have, it is a Presence you already have, and His word puts it in the form of a command precisely because it does not depend on how you feel while you obey it. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sentence live in a cold kitchen, and He does not wait for your hands to warm up first.

And notice the reach of it. Wherever you go. Not in the crisis, not on the battlefield, not on the impressive days. Wherever. Including a table with a cold plate on it at 1:53 on a Tuesday, with the phone face down and the dog asleep.

Now, about the body. Stop calling it the enemy. It is not. It is loyal, and it is fast, and it is doing something old and good, which is getting you ready. The trouble is that it has exactly one alarm, and that alarm does not know the difference between a hard conversation and something with teeth. So it runs the whole system an hour early for a phone call, because that is all it knows how to do, and it does it out of something very like love.

You are not fighting your body tonight. His word never once asks you to. What is happening in your stomach is not rebellion and it is not unbelief, and the same Spirit who is with you wherever you go is with you inside a chest that is going too fast.

Say this next part once, plainly, and then take it seriously. A body that does this deserves to be looked at by a doctor. What is going on in your chest and your stomach is not something anybody should be naming for you from a page, and some of it wants a trained set of eyes. Making that appointment is wisdom, not weakness, and nothing in this message should ever stand between you and care, urgent or otherwise.