The Number She Has Not Dialed

Seven years. She could tell you the month, and she is aware that being able to tell you the month is itself information.

The number is in her phone under the name she has always used, not her sister's full name, the short one from when they were children. She has looked at that entry more times than she would want counted. She has held her thumb above the call button four times that she can specifically remember, and probably more that she cannot.

It was not one thing. It almost never is. There was a version of events about their mother's last year that they could not make agree, and there was a sentence said at a kitchen table by one of them and a sentence said back by the other, and then there was a stretch of six months where nobody rang and the not-ringing became its own fact, and after two years the fact was older than the reason.

She is fifty-one now. She does not know whether her sister has looked at her name in the same way. That is the part that keeps it stuck: no information, in either direction, for seven years.

And I am going to say at the very start that I am not going to tell anybody to call their sister. I do not know what was said at that table. I do not know what either woman is carrying, what is safe, what has been tried, or what happened that neither of them puts in the story. Anybody who tells a stranger from a distance to pick up the phone and heal a family is playing with something they cannot see.

Taught in the way he shall choose

Let me put down a line and look carefully at a preposition, because everything is in it.

What man is he that feareth the LORD? him shall he teach in the way that he shall choose.Psalm 25:12

In the way that he shall choose. Not before it. The teaching in that verse is located inside the choosing rather than delivered in advance of it, and the person is still described as the one doing the choosing.

That is a different arrangement from the one most of us want. We want the answer handed over and then we will act. The psalm describes teaching that happens along the way of a choice a person is making.

You are taught inside the choosing rather than before it, and the psalm never took the choice away from you. That is not a soft word for a woman with her thumb above a name. It is what is written in Psalm 25, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and sets it beside somebody on a bench. The number is a number. The teaching is God's and it comes as a person moves.

And look at the whole psalm around it, because it is one of the most honest in the book. David asks four separate times to be shown, taught and led. Four times, in one psalm, which tells you he was not writing from a position of clarity.

You have permission to ask more than once, and asking repeatedly has never been treated as unbelief in that psalm. Psalm 25 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old request land in a woman on a stone porch.

Seven years is not a verdict on her

Now the part this category exists for, and it comes first.

Not calling is not hardness of heart. I want that dealt with immediately, because a woman in this position has usually been told, by somebody who meant well, that she should just pick up the phone, and that sentence has done a great deal of damage over the years.

There are good reasons not to call. There are situations where calling is unsafe. There are situations where calling would cost somebody else something they have not agreed to pay. And there are situations where a person is simply not ready, and not being ready is a real state and not a moral failing.

I am also not going to tell her not to call. That would be the same crime pointed the other way. I do not know.

What I will do is take one thing out of it, because I think it is the thing that has made seven years feel like a standing accusation.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Nigh unto. Near. Not near once the situation is repaired, and not near on condition of a phone call being made.

You were never held at a distance while this went unresolved, and the nearness in that verse has no condition attached to it. Psalm 34:18 is the written word for it, and His Spirit is the one who lets a person be close to God with a thing still broken in their family.

You are steady right now, on this bench, with the number exactly as undialed as it was in the spring. It is written that He teaches a person in the way they shall choose, and it is the Spirit who makes that true in a woman who has held her thumb over a name four times.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and talk to a doctor or a counselor about what the seven years have actually been carrying. Family estrangement is heavy in a way people do not say out loud, and being near to God has never been a reason to sit with it alone.