Somebody Will Ring And Ask About The Plan

It is not the day. It is the call.

Somewhere in the next few weeks a phone will go, and it will be a particular person, and after about ninety seconds of ordinary talk they will say some version of: so, what are we doing this year?

And that is the moment. Not the day itself, which you will get through the way you always do. The call. The instant where the whole thing stops being theoretical and becomes a set of arrangements you are now inside.

You have been rehearsing your answer since roughly August. Not deliberately. It happens while you are driving, or standing at a sink, and you notice you have been doing it for four minutes and you could not say when it started.

And here is what makes it worse rather than better: the rehearsing never settles anything. You get to the end of the imagined conversation, and there is no end, because the other person in your head is not the real person and will say whatever your worst version of them says. So you go round again. Then you put the phone face down on the table when it lights up, and you tell yourself you will call back later, and later comes and you do not.

I want to be plain about something before we go a step further. A man who dreads a phone call is not a coward. What you are actually flinching at is not a voice. It is the moment when a set of expectations gets attached to you and you have not decided in advance what you are carrying and what you are not.

That is a decision problem wearing the costume of a fear.

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings

There is a line in the psalms about news, and it is more precise than people usually hear.

He shall not be afraid of evil tidings: his heart is fixed, trusting in the LORD. (Psalm 112:7, King James Version)

Evil tidings. News that arrives from somewhere else, on somebody else's timing, about something you did not choose. That is a phone call in November.

Now watch the order, because the order is the whole engineering of the verse. It does not say his heart is calm and therefore he is not afraid. It says his heart is fixed. Fixed is not a feeling. Fixed is a mooring. Something has been settled and secured before the tidings ever arrive, and that prior settling is what the man's steadiness is resting on.

Which means the work is done beforehand. Not during the call. Before it.

You are able to fix something in advance of a call you cannot control, and it is written into Psalm 112:7 that the steadiness comes from the fixing rather than from the news. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live option for a man tonight rather than a description of somebody more spiritual than he is.

And note what the verse does not promise. It does not say the tidings will be good. It does not say his stomach stays quiet.

You have never once been asked to feel nothing when the phone lights up, and Scripture puts the fixing in the heart rather than in the nerves. Psalm 112:7 leaves the tidings exactly as they are and speaks about the man's mooring instead, and the Spirit of God is the one who does the actual fixing that a person cannot do for himself by effort.

Why the rehearsing does not work

Let me name what has actually been going on since August, because it has cost you a great deal and returned nothing.

Rehearsal is not preparation. It feels identical from the inside, which is why intelligent people do it for months. But a rehearsal happens in a room you built, with a person you invented, saying lines you wrote for them. Nothing that happens in there transfers, because the real call will open on some sentence you did not predict and the whole script goes.

And there is a second thing rehearsal does, quietly. It puts you into the conversation dozens of times before it happens, so by the time the real one arrives you are not fresh. You come to it already tired of it, already braced, already slightly short. The person on the other end hears a man who sounds like he wants this over with, and they have not said anything yet.

You were never made worse at this by dreading it, and the written word does not tie a man's steadiness to how well he predicted the conversation. Psalm 112:7 puts it on a heart fixed beforehand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who settles something in a man that no amount of practicing in the car ever could.

Here is the difference, and it is the practical heart of this. A rehearsal is a whole conversation. A decision is one sentence.

You cannot decide what they will say. You cannot decide how the call goes. What you can decide, tonight, in a quiet room with nothing happening, is the one thing you will say when the question comes. One sentence, settled while nobody is asking.

You have one sentence available to you that no telephone call can take away, and Scripture roots a man's confidence in something fixed rather than in an outcome he arranged. The Spirit of God is the one who is present when somebody decides a plain thing in advance and then leaves it alone.

What the sentence is for

Let me be careful about what I am and am not putting in your hands here.

I am not telling you what to say about the arrangements. I do not know your household, I do not know who is asking, I do not know what is reasonable in your situation, and nobody writing at this distance should be telling you what to agree to.

The sentence is not a decision about the day. It is a decision about the call.

Something like: I am glad you rang, I need a few days on it, and I will come back to you. Or: here is the one thing I know so far, and the rest I do not have yet. Or simply: that is a good question and I am not ready to answer it today.

You are permitted to hold a question open without that being a refusal, and it is written into Psalm 112:7 that a fixed heart is what carries a man through news he did not choose. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from filling a silence on the phone with something they did not mean.

And notice what one prepared sentence does to the ninety seconds before the question. It changes them completely. At the moment you have nothing prepared, so the whole call is a slow approach to a cliff. With one sentence settled, the call is a call. The question comes, the sentence goes out, and the conversation moves.

You will still not enjoy it. I am not selling you a good phone call. What I am telling you is that the cliff goes away, and the cliff was most of what you have been dreading since August.

You were made able to answer a question without settling everything behind it, and the written word does not require a man to have the whole matter resolved before he opens his mouth. Psalm 112:7 speaks of a heart already moored, and the Spirit of God is the one doing the mooring while a man sleeps.