He Stopped Calling Anybody Back

The last message he got back was in February and it was three words long, and he has read it more times than he would admit to anybody.

He still sends them. Not every day, because he worked out early that every day was too much and would feel like pressure. Twice a week, roughly, and he has become extremely careful about the content of them: nothing that requires an answer, nothing that says he is worried, nothing that could be read as a summons.

They are small messages. A thing he saw. A joke that only the two of them would understand. Once, a photograph of a place they went in 2009.

Nobody else is doing it. That is the part he has verified, quietly and without making it a thing, by asking two people in a way that did not sound like asking. The rest have gone quiet, and he understands why: months of no reply wears a person down and everybody has their own week.

So he is the last thread. He has never used that phrase out loud and it is exactly what he thinks, at eleven at night, with a phone in his hand.

And what has grown out of it is a specific fear, and it is a strange one: he cannot stop. Not because stopping would be unkind. Because somewhere in him a sum has assembled that says the day he stops sending is the day something happens.

And a friend, who loves them both, said last month: have you fasted for him?

He said he would. And what he felt was not hope. It was the fear finding a bigger container.

If you are somebody's last thread at eleven at night, come and sit in here a while.

The sum in you has a flaw in it

Let us look at it directly, because it has been running for months without ever being examined.

The sum says: I am the last connection, therefore the connection depends on me, therefore any lapse in my consistency is a risk to him.

Every step of that follows from the one before it. The trouble is the first line, and the first line is not true. You may well be the last person still sending messages. That is a fact about other people's stamina. It is not a fact about what is holding him.

You are not the last thread, and the holding was never running through a phone. That is not a soft word offered to a man in a study. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been reading his, in a flat you cannot get into, on every one of the days you have been sending small careful messages into silence.

Who does the going after

There is a parable everybody knows, and the part that matters for you is the verb and who owns it.

What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it?Luke 15:4

Read who moves in that story.

The sheep does nothing. It does not signal, it does not reply, it does not find its way toward anybody. The whole action of the parable belongs to the shepherd: leaves, goes after, finds. And the phrase at the end is the one to hold: until he find it.

Not: until it responds. Not: for a reasonable period. Until he find it.

You are not the one out looking, and Somebody with far better information has been out there the whole time. I am not saying it to reduce what you have done: it is the plain shape of the parable and who is given the verbs (Luke 15:4), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes it something a man can put weight on at eleven at night with a phone in his hand.

And going without does not hold a person on the earth

Here is a thing that must be said flatly, because of exactly where that suggestion landed in you.

Going without food is not a line attached to another human being. It does not keep somebody alive, it is not a covering, and it never was, and if it were, then every hour anybody stopped would be an hour of exposure, and that is a load no friend should carry and God has never once handed out.

You are not what stands between him and the worst thing, and you were never appointed to it. Scripture says the Lord is thy keeper, the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand (Psalm 121:5), and it is His Spirit who makes that a real allocation rather than a comfort, and the keeping in that verse does not pass through anybody's messages.

And here is the practical part, said plainly because it matters more than the theology on this page. If you genuinely believe your friend is in danger, do not carry that alone and do not carry it in prayer only. Ring his family, ring his doctor, ring a crisis line, ring the emergency services if it is that. That is not a failure of faith and it is not going behind God's back. That is exactly the help He puts in a world on purpose.

Now the sentence this site says everywhere. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. Diabetes, medication, any hard relationship with eating, being underweight, unwell, or simply unsure: speak to your doctor and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of what your body needs. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.