The Voicemail I Have Not Deleted

Thirty one seconds.

That is how long it is. You know the number because it is written on the screen underneath, and you have looked at that number more times than you could count.

It is nothing important. She is asking whether you got the thing, and there is a bit where she loses her thread, and at the end she says the thing she always said before she hung up.

You have not played it in about fourteen months.

You have had your thumb over it maybe two hundred times. You go in, you find it, you look at the thirty one, and you come back out.

And twice you have nearly deleted it, on two particular evenings, and both times something in your hand refused.

So it sits there, in a phone you have changed twice, transferred both times, deliberately, by somebody in a shop who did not know what they were moving.

I want to talk about that thirty one seconds, because it is not a problem and you have started treating it as one.

There is a category in scripture for exactly this, and it is not a category of weakness.

A book of remembrance

There is a moment in Malachi where God responds to people talking about Him, and what He does is have something written down.

And a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the LORD, and that thought upon his name. (Malachi 3:16, King James Version)

A book of remembrance. Written, kept, held, because some conversations are worth not losing.

God did not need it. Nothing is lost to Him and nothing needs recording for His benefit. The book exists because a record is the right response to something that mattered, and heaven keeps one.

You are keeping a record the way heaven keeps one, and a thing preserved has never once been a thing you are clinging to. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman looking at thirty one seconds on a screen, and Malachi 3:16 has a book written down for words that were worth keeping.

And notice what nobody does with that book.

Nobody asks whether it is healthy. Nobody suggests that keeping it is holding on. There is no point at which the book is reviewed to see whether the people in it have moved on sufficiently.

You have never once been assessed for how long you keep something, and no such assessment exists anywhere in the text. The written word keeps its record permanently and without comment, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a woman whose thumb has hovered two hundred times.

The two things you cannot do

Here is what I think is actually happening, and it is more precise than it feels.

There are two things you cannot do and they are different from each other.

You cannot play it, because thirty one seconds of her voice would go straight through you and you do not know what is on the other side of that. That is not weakness. That is an accurate assessment of your own capacity on an ordinary Tuesday.

And you cannot delete it, because that is a door that only closes once.

You are correct about both of those, and neither one has ever once been a failure of nerve. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a woman who has been right about her own capacity twice a day for fourteen months, and Malachi 3:16 keeps a record without requiring anybody to read it aloud.

And here is where it has started to cost you.

You have begun to think that because you can do neither, you are stuck. Stuck is a word for somebody who should be somewhere else. You are not somewhere else. You are exactly where a person is fourteen months after that, which is holding something, not playing it, and not letting it go.

You are exactly where somebody stands after this, and standing there has never once been the same as being stuck. The written word keeps a book and asks nothing of the people in it, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a woman who has been quietly diagnosing herself over a phone.

What today is instead

So today has nothing to do with the phone.

Open a door. Any door in that house behind which something of hers is. The wardrobe, the drawer, the box on top.

Open it. Look. Close it again.

You are opening something and taking nothing out, and opening it has never once been the beginning of a process. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman with her hand on a wardrobe door, and Malachi 3:16 writes the book and leaves it standing.

Here is why a door and not the phone.

The phone is thirty one seconds of her actual voice and there is no partial version of it. A door is different. A door can be opened halfway, looked into, and closed, at a cost you can actually measure in advance.

Today is something you can be certain of the size of. The phone is not that and does not have to be today.

You are doing the one that can be measured in advance, and the other one has never once needed to be today. The written word keeps its record with no due date on it, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a woman closing a wardrobe door quietly.