The Call That Was Heard

She will not ask a stranger to hold a lift.

She has thought about this properly, because it came up once, in an ordinary way, when a colleague watched her stand and wait for the next one rather than say a single syllable to a man who was already reaching for the button. Her colleague said, laughing, "You could have just said." And she laughed too and said something about not being in a hurry, and then she stood in the second lift on her own and looked at her own face in the brushed steel.

It is not shyness. She is not shy. She runs a shift of eleven people and she is very good at it and she will tell a supplier exactly where he has gone wrong in a tone that ends the conversation.

It is only the asking. Anything that has the shape of please, I need something, will you. Her mouth simply does not do it. There is no decision involved and there never has been. Somewhere a long way back a wire was cut, and now the request goes out and hits the cut and stops, and what comes out instead is "I'm fine," in a warm voice, quickly, before anybody can offer.

And then one Tuesday in the rain a man in a high visibility coat, a stranger, forty feet away, saw her coming with two bags and put his hand out and held the shop door with his boot and waited. That is all. He did not say anything clever. He was not being anything in particular. He held a door for eleven seconds for a woman who had not asked him to.

She got to her car and sat in it and could not start it for a while.

I am not going to ask you what happened. I want to be clear about that before we go any further, because you have probably had a lifetime of people wanting the details in exchange for the comfort, and there is no exchange here.

I only want to say the thing you already know and have never had said back to you.

You called, once, when you were small. And nobody came.

Somebody has to go back for the first one

Here is what usually happens next, and it is why so much good teaching bounces straight off you.

Somebody tells you that God hears prayer. That He is near to the broken. That you should call on Him and He will answer. And every word of it is true and none of it lands, because it is being said to a person who is being asked to make a new call, and the old one is still lying out there in the dark with no answer on it.

You cannot ask a person to try again when nobody has ever gone back for the first attempt. That is not stubbornness. It is arithmetic. Something in you did the sum a long time ago, and the sum said: calling out does not work, and the cost of finding that out again is more than I can pay.

And I am not going to argue with that sum, because the sum was honest. What I want to put in front of it is the one figure it never had. You are held by a God who keeps a record of nights nobody else was counting: Psalm 56:8 has Him putting tears in a bottle and every wandering into a book, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping that page open since the first night you needed it.

So we are not starting with a new call. We are going back for the old one.

Though my father and my mother abandon me, the Lord gathers me in.Psalm 27:10

Look at what David does and does not do in that line.

He does not explain it. There is no reason given anywhere in the sentence for why the two people who were supposed to come did not come. He does not defend them and he does not accuse them. He does not tell you it was for the best, or that they did their best, or that something good came of it. Not one word of any of that is in the verse, and if it is not in the verse it is not going in this message either. Nobody is going to hand you a reason today, because a reason was never what was owed to you.

What the verse does is name the fact and then put something underneath it. Though they did not come. The Lord gathers me in.

And the Hebrew there is a plain, physical, unglamorous word. Ya'asfeni. It is the word for bringing in the harvest before the weather turns. It is what you do with washing off the line when the sky goes dark, what a shepherd does with the animals at dusk, what you do at the end of a market day with the things left on the ground. To gather in. To collect what is out there and bring it inside the walls.

Which means this. That call did not fall into nothing. It was not lost. It went out into a dark house and it was picked up, and it has been in His keeping the entire time, along with the child who made it.

You did not know that. There is no possible way you could have known that, and nobody has ever come and told you.

Hear it now. It was heard. The one nobody answered. The one you have never described to a living soul. Heard, kept, gathered in, by the God who was in that house when nobody else was, and who has been holding the thing you called out ever since. Isaiah 49:15 puts God's memory beside the tenderest human one there is and says His outlasts it, and the Holy Spirit has carried that call intact through every year between that house and this paragraph.

And notice what has not been asked of you in any of this. You have not been asked to forgive anybody today. You have not been asked to understand, or to make peace, or to be ready, or to explain, or to be further along than you are. This is not a lesson you have to pass. Psalm 68:5 seats God as a father to the fatherless in His own holy dwelling and puts no entry test at that door, and the Holy Spirit, who has already read the part of this you have never said out loud, is not standing behind you with a list. Somebody has come back for the call, and coming back for it was never your job, because you were the one who made it.