An Hour Where Nobody Knows Where You Are

Try to remember the last time nobody could reach you.

Not the last time you did not answer. That is a different thing, and it is not restful at all, because a person who is not answering is still reachable and knows it.

I mean genuinely. An hour where there was no way to get to you, where you could not be found, where anybody looking for you would simply have had to wait.

For most people the honest answer is somewhere in their teens, before any of this existed, and they are startled when they work that out.

Twenty years, or thirty, of continuous availability. Every hour of it. Asleep as well.

And nobody ever decided that either. It arrived, and it arrived attached to good things, and every one of those good things is real: the call that came in time, the person who could find you, the child who could always get hold of you.

I am not against any of that and I am not going to argue with it.

But something was lost, and it was lost so quietly that most people have never once thought of it as a loss, and I want to name it properly, because a thing that is not named cannot be missed and cannot be looked for.

The psalm is written by somebody looking up

There is a psalm that begins with a man outside at night, and what strikes me about it is the posture it requires.

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained. (Psalm 8:3, King James Version)

Consider is a slow word. It is not glance. It is not notice. It is the sustained attention of somebody who has nothing else running.

And look at what he is doing physically. He is outside. It is night. He is looking up rather than at anything in his hands, and there is nothing at all between him and the sky.

That posture is not available to a person who is reachable. Not because a phone is wicked, but because attention that can be interrupted is attention that is partly reserved, and reserved attention cannot consider anything. It can only sample.

You are able to give something your whole attention, and it has never once been possible to do that while any part of you is on call. Psalm 8:3 describes a sustained looking rather than a glance, and it is the Holy Spirit who can hold a person's attention still for long enough to see something.

Small is the relief, not the insult

Now what that considering does to him, because it is the opposite of what most people expect.

The next verse is the famous one. What is man, that thou art mindful of him. People read that as a person being made to feel small, and they brace for it, because feeling small sounds like being diminished.

Read it in context and it is not that at all. It is a man who has been carrying things looking up at something enormous and finding out that he is not holding it up.

That is not humiliation. That is the single most restful discovery available to a human being, and it is not available at all to somebody who is reachable, because a person who can be reached at any second is by definition still holding something.

Being genuinely small for an hour, in the actual sense of not being the load bearing part of anything, is a rest of a kind that no chair provides.

You are not holding the sky up, and being reachable has never once been what kept anything in place. Psalm 8:3 has a man consider a thing his own fingers did not make. The Spirit of God is the one who makes smallness land as relief in a person who has been the center of a system for twenty years.

And let me say plainly to whoever is bracing right now. Nobody is telling you to be unreachable in general. The people who need to find you are not a burden and this is not a case against being available.

You are rightly available to the people who need you, and none of that has ever been the thing this hour is against. The written word takes a man outside for a night rather than out of his life, and His Spirit is entirely able to give somebody an hour without taking anything from anybody.

Leave it behind, do not silence it

Now the practical part, and there is one distinction in it that makes the whole difference.

Silencing a phone does not work.

A silenced phone is still a thread. It is in a pocket, it is accumulating, and some part of a person is aware of it the entire time. Everybody has had the experience of a silent phone in a pocket being just as present as a ringing one.

Leave it behind. Physically. In a drawer, in the house, in the car.

The reason this is different is not spiritual, it is mechanical. A thing that is elsewhere cannot be checked, and a thing that cannot be checked stops being a decision you keep making.

And tell one person you will be back in an hour, so that nobody is worried and nobody is looking, because being unreachable is restful and being missing is not, and the two are not the same.

Then go somewhere and look up, if there is a sky, or out, if there is a distance. An hour.

You are able to leave a thing behind rather than silence it, and no hour has ever been made quiet by a phone that was still in the room. Psalm 8:3 puts a man under an open sky with nothing in his hands. The same Spirit who inspired that psalm is well able to meet somebody in a high place with the light going off the water.