The Phone Call That Has Not Come

He is awake at ten to midnight and the ceiling has that faint moving line on it that headlights make when a car turns into the road.

Every car. He knows the sound of hers, and he knows the sound of the neighbor's, and he knows the one that belongs to the taxi firm, and he has learned all of this without ever deciding to learn any of it.

She is twenty-three and a perfectly good driver and it is a forty minute road, and she texts when she leaves because she is kind and because he asked her to about a year ago in a way he tried to make sound casual.

The text came at twenty past eleven. So he knows the arithmetic and he has been doing it since, and he will keep doing it until the door.

And in the meantime, in the dark, he has taken the call.

Not once. Forty times, in variations, over about two years. He knows who rings. He knows what the first four words are. He has been through the part where he wakes his wife and the part where they get dressed and the part in the car, and once, on a bad night in February, he got as far as working out what he would say at the funeral, and then he sat up and turned the light on because he could not stay in the room with himself any more.

He has never told anybody he does this. Not because it is shameful exactly, but because there is no way to say it that does not sound like something is wrong with him.

That is you, and nothing has ever happened.

Nobody here is going to call this a faith problem

Let me put that down first, because it is the thing most likely to be sitting on you.

If you have been anywhere near religious language on this subject, you may have picked up the idea that a person who genuinely trusted God would not be lying awake taking imaginary phone calls, and that the rehearsing is therefore evidence about your relationship with Him. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Philippians 4:6-7, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

It is not, and it never has been.

A mind that produces disaster footage about somebody it loves is doing a thing minds do, and Scripture nowhere treats that as a spiritual failure. The Bible is full of people afraid: Jacob dividing his camp in the night because he is frightened of his brother, David saying his heart is sore pained within him, Jesus Himself sweating in a garden and asking for the cup to pass. Nobody in that list is corrected for the fear.

You are not less His at ten to midnight than you are at ten in the morning. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and it attaches no requirement of composure anywhere in the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that near enough to lean on in a dark bedroom.

And if this has taken over your nights for a long stretch, there are people who work with exactly this and are good at it. Going to them is not a lesser road than praying. It never was.

What the rehearsing is actually for

Here is the mechanism, and naming it will not switch it off but it will stop it spreading.

You are not predicting. You would say so yourself if anybody asked; you do not believe it is going to happen. Scripture holds that ground in Philippians 4:6-7, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

You are rehearsing, and rehearsing is a thing people do to reduce the shock of something. Some part of you has decided that if you have already been through it forty times, then the real thing, if it ever came, would find you prepared. This rests on Scripture in Philippians 4:6-7, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

It would not. That is the cruel joke at the center of it. No amount of rehearsal has ever made a real loss smaller, and everybody who has had one will tell you the same. All the rehearsing does is charge you the emotional cost of the thing repeatedly, in advance, for an event that has never occurred.

You have been paying for something forty times over that has not happened once. Scripture says take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself, Matthew 6:34, and it is not scolding when it says it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a man to stop paying a bill nobody issued.

The verse people quote, and the part they skip

There is a passage in Philippians that ends up on cards, and the shape of it is the whole point.

Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.Philippians 4:6-7

Two things worth stopping on.

The first is keep. That is a guard word. Paul is not describing a nice feeling that settles over a person. He is describing something posted around your heart and mind like a sentry, and a sentry is exactly what you have been trying to be, personally, from ten to midnight until the door. Scripture already said it in Philippians 4:6-7, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

The second is passeth all understanding, and it is more useful than it sounds. It does not mean the peace is mysterious. It means it does not come from having worked things out. Which is important, because you have been trying to reach peace by understanding: by doing the arithmetic, by knowing the road, by having rehearsed every version. That route is closed, and not because you are bad at it. It is closed because that is not where the peace comes from.

You are not required to think your way to quiet. Scripture says the peace of God which passeth all understanding shall keep your hearts and minds, Philippians 4:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the keeping while a man is still awake.

And the honest limit

I am going to say the hard thing plainly, because you would not trust me if I did not.

None of this is a guarantee about your daughter. Nothing on this page promises that the call never comes, for you or for anybody, and any voice that does is writing a check nobody authorized. Terrible things happen to people God loves. That is in the Bible on almost every page and pretending otherwise would be an insult to your intelligence and to everyone it has happened to.

What is being offered is not a shield over the road. It is a different keeper of your nights.

Because here is what has actually been happening: some part of you has taken on the job of holding her safe by vigilance, as though the watching were load-bearing, and it is not, and it never was, and the exhaustion you feel is the entirely predictable result of a man doing a job that was never his.

You are not what stands between your daughter and that road. Scripture says except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain, Psalm 127:1, and it goes on in the next verse to say it is vain to sit up late, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hear that as relief rather than as a rebuke.