One Text At Six In The Morning

Six o'clock, or a few minutes either side, and never later than ten past, because after ten past it looks like he forgot and remembered.

One person. A man he has known for a very long time and does not see, who is in a situation that is not going to change in the way anybody would like, and who replies about one time in five with a thumbs up and about one time in twenty with something real.

The text is usually two lines. Sometimes a verse. Sometimes just the weather where he is and the sentence thinking of you today, which he is aware is not a sermon.

He has done this for three years and eleven months. He knows because he can scroll back and the first one is still there.

That is it. That is the whole of it now. There was a time when he would have described himself, honestly and without pride, as somebody with a ministry, and it involved a lot of people and a great deal of driving and a diary he had to keep.

What ended it is a series of things that are nobody's fault and that he can list in about forty seconds, and the list is not the point.

The sentence lives in the gap between hitting send and putting the phone down. Not I wish I did more. It is: this is not a ministry, this is a man staying in touch.

You know that gap. It might be a text, or a card, or a prayer for one name. Everything you used to do has come down to one small repeated thing, and you cannot bring yourself to call it what it is, because calling it that would be a claim you are not sure you can defend.

The interruption

There is a young man in Jeremiah who tries to explain to God why he is not the right size for the assignment, and he does not get to finish.

But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.Jeremiah 1:7

Say not. That is the first thing out of God's mouth. Not an argument, not encouragement, not a discussion of whether the objection has merit. A flat instruction about what Jeremiah is to stop saying about himself.

And then the sending is stated as a plain fact: thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee. The size of the man was never a factor in the sentence. It is simply not in it.

Now transfer that. Jeremiah's objection was youth. Yours is smallness. The structure is identical: a man explaining to God why what he is does not qualify.

You are sent to whoever God sends you to, and the sending has never once been sized against what you used to run. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man with a phone at six in the morning, and the Holy Spirit who has kept you at this for nearly four years is the evidence that it is not a hobby.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic in the gap after send. If the sending is stated as fact, then one text a day is information about a life that changed for reasons you can list in forty seconds. It is not too small to be a sending, and it never had the standing to become that.

What you cannot see from your end

Here is the second thing, and it is a matter of position rather than encouragement.

From where you sit there is a message, a thumbs up one time in five, and silence. That is your entire data set and it is genuinely thin.

From the other end there is a phone that goes at six every morning in a situation that is not going to improve, and has done for one thousand four hundred and thirty odd days, and has never once been missed.

You are the only person who is measuring this by the replies.

You have been carried through every one of those mornings, and the carrying was not proportioned to the size of the send. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work at the other end of that message rather than assessing the word count.

And nothing here is asking for two texts, or a call, or a visit. Nothing here is telling you this grows into something. If it is one text at six for the next fifteen years and then it stops because one of you dies, you have not stepped one inch outside the sending.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a phone screen. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken. Not thought about in a gap for four years. And the thing in the way is not the list of reasons the old work ended. It is a sentence: this is not a ministry, this is a man staying in touch. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority at six in the morning. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the diary you used to keep.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than embarrassment, and there are mornings when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.