The Friend She Stopped Ringing

They spoke every Tuesday for about fourteen years.

Not arranged. It simply happened, in the way it does with somebody you met at nineteen, and if one of them missed it there would be a message the next day and then they would speak on the Wednesday instead.

She has not rung her since March.

It is not a falling out. There has been no word. If you asked her friend she would say they had both been busy and would mean it, because the messages still go back and forth and there is nothing in them that reads wrong.

But she does not ring, and when the phone goes on a Tuesday she looks at it and lets it go, and then she sends something warm about an hour later.

Here is the reason and she has never said it out loud.

Her friend has the thing she has been waiting for.

Not showily. Her friend is not that sort of person and has never once said anything careless about it. It is simply present in her life, in the ordinary background way that a settled thing is, and it comes up because it is her life and why would it not.

And somewhere in the spring she found she could not do it any more. Not the friendship. The forty minutes of hearing about a life that has the thing in it.

She is ashamed of that in a way she has not been ashamed of anything for years.

If you have let a call go lately, come and sit at this table. Nobody is going to tell you what that says about you.

Paul admits the wearing out and then says what is happening underneath it

There is a verse people quote for the second half, and the first half is the one you need this afternoon.

For which cause we faint not; but though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.2 Corinthians 4:16

Look at what Paul is willing to say out loud. The outward man perishes. He does not soften it, he does not say seems to, and he is not talking about anything abstract: he means the visible, functioning, going-about-its-business part of a person wears out under sustained pressure.

He knows. He is writing this in the middle of a list of things that had happened to him that would flatten most people.

And then he says the other thing, and the two are in the same sentence on purpose. While that is going on, something else is happening in the opposite direction, daily, and it is not being done by the person it is happening to.

You are being renewed while you are being worn, and both of those are true about you this afternoon. 2 Corinthians 4:16 puts the perishing and the renewing in one line without resolving them into each other, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the renewing rather than your endurance, which means the wearing you can feel is not the whole account.

What you did with that phone is not a verdict on you

Now the thing actually being carried, which is not the waiting.

You let a call go from somebody you love, and you know why, and you have been holding that against yourself since March. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the reason for His pity rather than as a note in a file, and it is the same Spirit who comforts rather than prosecutes.

So let it be named accurately, because the accurate name is kinder than the one in use and it is also more useful.

That was not envy in the way you mean it. Envy wants the other person not to have it. You do not want that, you never have, and a minute of honest thinking would settle it. 1 Corinthians 13:4 says charity envieth not and sets it beside suffering long in the same breath, and it is the same Spirit who grows that fruit in a person who is aching.

What happened is simpler and more physical. Forty minutes of proximity to the exact shape of the thing being waited for costs something, and it has been met every Tuesday for years, and in March the account it comes out of was empty.

That is depletion. It is not a moral failure, and treating it as one has added a second weight on top of the first.

You are not being convicted here, and there is no case open on you. Romans 8:1 says there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ Jesus, and it is His Spirit who is named immediately after as the law of life which made you free, which means the shame you have carried since March is not coming from where you assumed.

And I am not going to tell you when the waiting ends, because I do not know and nobody does, and a website that guesses about your life is not worth reading.

You have somewhere to put this, and it does not require you to feel differently first. 1 Peter 5:7 says cast all your care upon Him, for He careth for you, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that an actual handing over rather than a form of words, which means Tuesday has an address now and it is not your own chest.

God is the one holding you, and He has been holding you through every Tuesday, including the ones you let ring out.