The Number That Rings Out

Nine times. He knows it is nine because he has stopped pretending to himself that he is not counting.

It rings six times and then it goes to a recorded voice that says the name of the department and then a beep, and he has left three messages and stopped leaving them, because a fourth message is a different kind of thing from a third.

The whole thing waits on one signature. That is the honest architecture of it. There is a form and it needs a name at the bottom, and everything downstream of that name has been standing still since June: the money, the dates, the two people who are waiting to know whether they have work, and a family conversation he has been postponing for eleven weeks.

He has been reasonable. He has been polite in every message. He has been careful not to be the man who is difficult, because he has watched what happens to the man who is difficult.

He is not sure the person is avoiding him. That is the strange part, and it is worse than certainty. It might be a caseload. It might be sickness. It might be that his file is in a pile and the pile is under another pile.

The sentence comes while it is still ringing. Not this person is ignoring me. It is: everything I have is sitting behind a door that one human being has not opened, and there is nothing else I can do.

You know that number. It might be an official, or a relative, or a manager, or a solicitor. Your life is standing in a doorway waiting for one person to move, and you have been reasonable and careful for so long that being reasonable has become another kind of weight.

The prayer of a man with nothing left to try

There is a moment in Chronicles where a king finds out an army is coming that he cannot fight, and he prays in front of everybody, and the last sentence of the prayer is the most useful thing in the Bible for a man with a phone in his hand.

O our God, wilt thou not judge them? for we have no might against this great company that cometh against us; neither know we what to do: but our eyes are upon thee.2 Chronicles 20:12

Three admissions and then a direction. We have no might. We do not know what to do. And then, without a plan appearing in between: our eyes are upon You.

Notice what is missing. There is no strategy in that verse. He does not say we have one idea left. He does not say we will try harder. He says out loud, in front of the whole assembly, that he has run out, and then he looks up.

You are permitted to say that you do not know what to do, and saying it has never once been treated by God as a failure. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man listening to a ringtone, and the Holy Spirit who is with you at this moment is the evidence that the looking up does not require a plan first.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic while it rings. If a man with no options is exactly the person that prayer was written for, then a number that rings out is information about a caseload and a pile and a human being with their own June. It is not the thing your life waits on, and it never had the standing to become that.

What this page will not promise, and who it will not accuse

Here is the second thing, and it goes in two directions.

Nothing here will tell you that the call gets answered. Nobody knows. Nothing here will name a week, or say that God is about to make somebody pick up, because that promise has been made to people in doorways and the ones for whom it did not happen were left worse off than before.

And nothing here will make the person on the other end into a villain. You do not know why they have not called back and you are not going to find out. Something in you has been building a picture of that person for eleven weeks, and it is probably wrong, and it is definitely expensive.

You have been carried through every week since June, and the carrying was never routed through anybody's signature. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work in this rather than waiting at a desk for somebody to come back from leave.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought and a ringtone. 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 counted silently to nine. And the thing in the way is not the person and it is not the form. It is a sentence: there is nothing else I can do. Which is true, and which is exactly what Jehoshaphat said out loud in front of everybody, and nobody has ever answered it out loud for you.

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 holding a phone. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how reasonable you have been.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than frustration, and there are hours 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.