Nineteen Unanswered Messages

The curtains are open about a third of the way, which is how they were left the night before, and the light coming through them is the flat kind that does not tell you the hour.

The phone is face up on the bedspread near his knee. It has been there since before noon. Every so often the screen lifts itself into life, holds a name and a line of text for a few seconds, and goes dark again, and each time it does this he reads it, and each time he reads it he understands that he is not going to answer it, and each time he understands that, something small closes.

His sister at nine forty. Did you get the thing about Sunday?

Work at ten fifteen, which is fine, it is not urgent, it says so.

His friend Karim at eleven, who does not text often. Salaam brother. Long time.

By four in the afternoon there are nineteen. He knows there are nineteen because he counted them, which took no effort at all, and answering even one of them is so far beyond him that the two facts sitting side by side make no sense to anybody, including him.

There is nothing wrong. That is the part he cannot say to anyone. Nobody has died. He has not been fired. There was no argument. He simply got to a certain point and the machinery that turns wanting into doing stopped connecting, and he has been lying on top of the covers, fully dressed, since about half eleven, watching a phone light up and go dark.

And the whole time, underneath, a running commentary he did not write and cannot switch off. Karim will think you do not care. Your sister has told your mother by now. This is who you are becoming. Other people are having an afternoon.

At some point he turns the phone face down. This feels like a decision and it is the only one he makes all day. Then he turns it face up again twenty minutes later, because face down was somehow worse, and the screen lights with a twentieth name and he watches it fade.

He is not lazy. Nobody who has lived inside one of these days needs telling that, and nobody who has not will believe it anyway. He is not sulking and he is not avoiding anybody and he would give a great deal to be a person who answers his messages.

If you have never had a day like that, I am glad, and this one is not for you today. If you are on top of the covers right now with a phone beside your knee, then it is you I came for, and I am not going to ask you for anything. Not a plan. Not a small step. Not even a reply to Karim. Stay exactly where you are and let me tell you one thing about who is looking at you.

He knows what you are made of, and He is not revising the file

There is a line in the psalms that I have watched land in people at exactly this point, and it never lands the way they expect. They brace for the part where they are told to get up. It does not come.

For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.Psalm 103:14

Sit in the first half for a moment. He knows our frame. The word is the one used for something shaped, formed, put together by a potter's hands. It is knowledge from the inside, the knowledge of the maker rather than the observer. Not what you look like at four in the afternoon. What you are built out of.

Which means that today has told Him nothing new. Everything you have concluded about yourself since half eleven, He has held about you since before you were born, and He held it without disappointment, because a maker is not disappointed to find that clay is clay.

You are known all the way down, by the One whose hands did the shaping. That is what Psalm 103:14 says and not a softer version of it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line and lays it over a person lying on top of the covers, so it stops being poetry and starts being an actual fact in an actual room.

And the second half is the part people miss. He remembers. Not He tolerates. Not He makes allowances, in that way people make allowances with a small tightening around the mouth. He remembers, which in the psalms is an active word, the word for God turning toward a thing and acting on it. Your limits are not something He forgets and then has to be reminded of by your bad day. They are in front of Him, and He moves toward you on the basis of them.

You have a God who remembers what you are made of on the days you have forgotten. Psalm 103:14 puts the remembering on His side of the sentence, and His Spirit is the One who carries that across the gap between a page and a person, which is a gap you have no strength to cross this afternoon and are not being asked to.

One plain thing, and then I will leave it. If today is one afternoon, this is one afternoon. If it has been most days for weeks, if the mornings have all been like this and the flat light has stopped lifting, please tell your doctor, in ordinary words, exactly as you would tell them about a pain in your side. That is not a spiritual failure and going is not a retreat from anything. God gave people to look after bodies and He is not embarrassed by the ones who do.

Dust is not an accusation

Now the word people flinch at. Dust. It sounds like a put down, and every one of us hears it in the register of the voice that has been running commentary all afternoon.

Read where it sits. It is in the middle of the tenderest psalm in the book, three lines after as a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him. The dust line is not the sting in the tail of that sentence. It is the reason for it. He is compassionate toward you because He knows exactly what you are made of. The dust is the grounds of the mercy, not an exception to it.

And dust is what He chose to work with. He did not begin with something sturdier and settle for this. He knelt down in it, on purpose, and breathed, and the whole human story starts there.

You were dust when He chose you and He has not revised the file since. That is written into Psalm 103:14, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it land somewhere lower than agreement, in the place where you actually keep your opinion of yourself.

So when the commentary tells you that today means something about your character, notice that it is arguing with the maker. It is telling you that you have limits, and He already told you that, in gentler words, thousands of years before you had a phone. The only difference is what the two of them do with the information. The voice uses it as evidence. He uses it as a reason to come closer.

You are the one He knelt down for, and creatures He shapes with His hands are allowed to have afternoons like this one. Psalm 103:14 is His own account of you, and it is His Spirit, not your willpower, who brings it into a room with the curtains a third open.