Nine Years in My Phone

It has moved through four phones. That is the part that got her attention when she finally thought about it properly.

Every time she has upgraded, everything has transferred across, and every time she has gone through afterward and cleared out the dead numbers, the old landlines, the plumber from the apartment she left in 2014. And every single time, she has come to that one and gone past it.

She has never called it. Not once in nine years. She does not know whether it still works.

Last week a friend was helping her sort out something on the phone, saw it come up, said the name out loud in surprise, and then said the obvious thing: why do you not just delete it?

And she said: I do not know.

Which was the truest thing she said all evening and also the most annoying, because she is a woman who usually knows why she does things.

And here is what she has never said out loud to anybody: she is not keeping it in order to use it, and she is not keeping it because she cannot decide, and she has no third explanation available.

The two explanations on offer are both wrong

Let me take the question seriously, because your friend asked it in good faith and you have been chewing on it for a week.

There are two available answers in the culture and neither one fits. The first is that you are keeping it because you intend to use it, which you are not, and you know you are not, and nine years is enough evidence for anybody.

The second is that you cannot let go, which sounds sophisticated and is actually just an accusation with a soft voice on it. And it does not fit either, because you have let go of a great many things in nine years. You are not a person who cannot.

What is left is the possibility that a person can keep something without a plan attached to it, and that our language has almost no room for that, and that the absence of a word is not the absence of a thing.

You are keeping something without a plan, and there is nothing dishonest in you about it. That is not somebody defending a phone contact. Psalm 139:1 says He has searched you and known you, which means the actual thing underneath nine years is fully visible to Him whether or not it has a name in English, and the Holy Spirit is the one raising it now to settle you rather than to make you choose one of two bad options.

What the book does with waiting that has no plan in it

Read what is actually said about it, because it is a category Scripture recognizes even though our friends do not.

The Lord is good unto them that wait for him, to the soul that seeketh him. It is good that a man should both hope and quietly wait for the salvation of the Lord.Lamentations 3:25

Quietly wait. Not strategically wait. There is no plan anywhere in that verse, and no schedule, and no instruction to review the position annually.

And the whole book it sits in is written by a man in ruins with no reason for optimism at all. This is not a verse from a comfortable place. It is somebody sitting in the worst circumstances in the Bible saying that quiet waiting is good.

You are doing something Scripture calls good, and it calls it good without asking for a plan. Lamentations 3:25 puts the goodness in the waiting itself rather than in what it is for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that to a woman going through a contact list at a kitchen table.

Keeping and clinging are two different things

The test is not how you feel about the name. It is what it costs anybody.

That number costs nothing. It occupies no space. Nobody knows it is there except one friend who saw it by accident last week. It has never been used, never been mentioned to the person it belongs to, and never once been the reason you did or did not do something else.

Clinging changes a life. This has not changed anything.

You are holding something that has never held you back, and nine years of it has cost nobody a thing. Scripture puts the difference in Philippians 3:13, where Paul talks about forgetting what is behind and reaching forward, and notice that he is describing a direction of travel rather than an inventory of what a person is allowed to keep, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person forward without requiring them to empty their pockets first.

Where your part ends

Say this plainly. Keeping something is never the same as owing anybody access, and nothing here asks anybody to keep a door open into harm. If there is a reason that number should go, delete it tonight and lose nothing. Get whoever is at risk safe, tell one real person who can actually do something, and hold this: safety comes before peace, always.

And this too. Nothing here says you will ever use it, and nothing here says you should. Any page that told you what will happen would be lying to a woman who has carried it through four phones.

But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.Isaiah 40:31

Wait upon the Lord. That is the object, and it is not a person and it is not an outcome. You are being renewed by waiting on Him, and that account is entirely separate from the one in your contact list. Isaiah 40:31 puts the renewing in God rather than in a resolution, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies it whether a number stays or goes.