The Phone in His Back Pocket

Saturday, ten in the morning, and the grass is still wet enough that the ball skids when it comes across the middle.

He is on the sideline near the halfway line, where he always stands, because he brought a folding chair three seasons ago and has never once sat in it. There is a plastic tub of orange slices by his feet that his wife cut at seven this morning. A man down the line is shouting encouragement at somebody else's kid. Somebody's little sister is doing cartwheels behind the goal and falling over every time and getting up delighted. His son is playing right side today, number nine, socks pulled up over the knee the way he insists on, and he is having a good game.

Here is the trouble. Every time a phone buzzes anywhere on that sideline, his hand goes to his back pocket. Not a decision. A reflex, like a knee. And the phone is not going to ring, because it is Saturday, and nobody calls on a Saturday, and he knows that with the part of his brain that knows things, and the rest of him has spent four days now living about six inches behind a screen.

They took the sample on Tuesday. Somebody said end of the week and then somebody else said probably early next week, and those two sentences have been running against each other in his head ever since.

So he watches the game the way you read a page while somebody is talking to you. His son gets the ball at the corner of the box, cuts inside past a boy twice his width, and puts it against the far post so hard the whole sideline makes a noise, and by the time the ball rebounds back across the six his father is looking at a locked screen with no notifications on it.

The boy turns around, straight away, the way they do. Looking for his dad on the sideline.

That is you, perhaps, on your own sideline, at your own version of a Saturday. You are here and you are not here. Your body is standing on wet grass with orange slices at your feet and your mind is at the far end of the week, running the conversation, and running it again, and taking both versions apart, and the thing in your pocket that has said absolutely nothing for four days has somehow become the loudest thing on the field.

Nobody ever trained you to wait

Let me tell you what your mind is actually doing out there, because you may have been calling it worry, and worry is too small a word for it.

You are not sitting still and feeling anxious. You are working. You are running rehearsals, and you are good at it. You have played the good version of the phone call and the bad version, several times each, with the wording, with the tone of voice they might use, with what you would say afterward and who you would tell first and in what order. You have practiced the drive home. You have practiced how your face should look. And every rehearsal costs you exactly the same as the real thing would, because your body does not know the difference between the call and the fourteenth run through of it.

That is what a week like this does. It takes a Saturday that was actually yours and spends it somewhere that has not happened.

Now hear the command in the middle of the psalm, and hear that it is a command and not a mood.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.Psalm 46:10

Be still is not be calm. Nobody can be ordered into calm and God does not waste words. It is a command to stop doing something, to drop what is in your hands, to leave off. It is not aimed at your feelings. It is aimed at the work you have been doing, which is the rehearsing, and the reason it can be commanded is that the rehearsing was never yours to carry in the first place.

You are standing on ground God is already at both ends of, and He is not waiting on news about you. That is not my reassurance. Psalm 46:10 is where it comes from, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line written about a shaking earth and lands it on a man in his coat beside a soccer field.

You have a Saturday, and it belongs to you, and no unmade phone call has the authority to take it. It is written that He is God and that He is exalted in the earth, and His Spirit is the One who brings a wandering mind back to the wet grass it is standing on, over and over, patiently, without once telling you off for leaving.

This page does not know what the call will say

Now I have to be honest with you about what I do not have, and I want you to trust me more because of it and not less.

I do not know what the call is going to say. I am not going to tell you it will be good news, because I do not know that, and if I said it and it was not, I would have set you up to be knocked flat by God as well as by the news, and that is a cruelty dressed as comfort. And I am not going to hint at the other thing either, or brace you for the worst, because that is just the rehearsing again with a Bible verse taped to it.

So let me put the two true things together in one breath, right here where the temperature is up, because this is exactly where a promise would be easiest. God heals. He is a healer, He heals bodies, that is His character and His written word and not a rumor, and this site was built to say it out loud and not to mumble it. And I do not promise you the result. I cannot and I will not, and no honest voice can. We declare what He has said and we leave the current to Him.

Which means everything on this page has to hold if the call is the one you did not want. Read that again, because it is the test of whether any of this is worth anything to you. If the news is hard, God is not further away on Monday than He is on this sideline today, nothing you did or failed to do arranged it, and nobody failed to have enough faith here. That sentence is not in the book and it is not true. And the care those people are giving you is a good gift from God, so keep your appointments and take what they give you. He is not in competition with the people looking after your body.

You are held in the days between, and you were never asked to know the ending in order to be at rest inside it. Psalm 46 puts God in the middle of a world coming apart and calls Him a very present help, and it is His Spirit who makes present help something you can actually stand in rather than a phrase.

And one more thing, because it matters more than the rest. If this week has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking everybody would have an easier time without you, tell a human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can come and stand next to you tonight. This page cannot do that. You deserve somebody in the room, and calling them is not weakness, it is the most sensible thing you will do all week.