Nine Weeks of a Quiet Phone

The van has been loaded since Monday of the first week, and you have not unloaded it, because unloading it would mean something.

Ladders on. Boxes in order. The good drill in the front footwell where you always put it. Nine weeks of a van packed for a job that has not been booked.

You check the phone. Not for messages. You check that it is not on silent, and you do it four or five times a day now, and you did not do it at all in April.

Thirty years on the tools. You have a reputation up and down the valley that you did not build with advertising, and every man who ever had you in his house asked for you again. That is the part that will not fit into what is happening now. Work has always come. It came in bad years. It came the winter your back went and you sent your nephew.

Nine weeks.

You have been going out to the workshop in the mornings and doing things that do not need doing. Sharpening what is sharp. Sorting screws by size, which your father did and which you always thought was a waste of a morning until this year.

The phone is on the bench, face up, not on silent. You have checked.

The psalm puts the eye before the deliverance

There is a couplet in Psalm 33 with the order the right way round.

Behold, the eye of the LORD is upon them that fear him, upon them that hope in his mercy; to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.Psalm 33:18-19

The eye comes first. Before any deliverance, before any keeping alive, the psalmist says the eye of the Lord is on them, and he says it in the present tense about people who are, in the next line, in a famine.

That is not a small thing to notice. Being looked at by God and being in a lean stretch are not opposites, and the verse puts them in the same sentence without any embarrassment at all.

You are being looked at, right now, in the ninth week. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says the eye of the Lord is upon them that hope in His mercy, Psalm 33:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that into a workshop where a man is sorting screws he does not need sorted.

Nothing here is advice about the trade

I am not going to tell you a single thing about getting work.

I do not know your valley, your trade, or who is building and who is not this year. You have thirty years of that in your hands and I have none of it, and a stranger suggesting you try something is an insult delivered as help.

So nothing here about advertising, or ringing round, or what you should have done differently. Nothing on this page reads nine quiet weeks as a report on your effort. Scripture does not read a closed door that way, Psalm 33:19, and the Holy Spirit is not the voice telling a man in a workshop that he should have been cleverer.

You have not been overlooked by God this spring. That was true in April when the phone was ringing and it is exactly as true now.

What the checking is really about

Here is the thing worth naming, because it is doing more damage than the money.

You are not checking the phone because you think you missed a call. You check it because a quiet phone has begun to feel like a verdict being handed down slowly, and checking is the only action available to a man who wants to argue with it.

Scripture never asked a man to argue with a silence, Psalm 33:20, and the Holy Spirit is not the one making the phone the referee. Nine weeks is long enough for a new sentence to move in. It goes something like: they have stopped asking for me. Or worse, and quieter: maybe they were being kind for a while.

That sentence is not from Scripture and it is not from the Holy Spirit. It is what silence does to a man who has always been measured by being wanted.

You are not less of a tradesman in week nine than you were in week one. Scripture says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and the Holy Spirit does not price a pair of hands off a diary.

Provision now, and the work later

Two things are true and the silence keeps welding them together.

There is the work you are made for, which has not come. And there is this week, which has been got through, somehow, in a way that would not have looked possible if you had been shown it in advance.

I am not going to call the second the answer to the first. It is not. Nine weeks is not a plan you were handed, and I will not dress it up as one. Scripture is willing to say daily bread and stop there, Matthew 6:11, and the Holy Spirit does not need a thin spring explained before He will be in it.

But this household has eaten for nine weeks with no job on the board, and that is not luck and it did not happen by accident.

You are provided for while the phone is quiet. Scripture says He keeps them alive in famine, Psalm 33:19, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man hold that and his frustration at the same time without either becoming a lie.