The Voicemail He Left Twice

The first one was fine.

He has listened back to it since, because you can, and it was fine. It was clear, it did not go on, it said the thing he meant to say and it said it in a decent order, and there was a moment near the end where his voice went slightly and that was honest and it did not sound like a performance.

Then he sat in the car for eleven minutes and called back and left another one.

Gareth is fifty two. The second one was longer. It started by apologizing for the first one, which he has since realized is a strange way to begin, and it went over the same ground with two extra sentences that he had thought of while sitting there, and at the end he said sorry again.

She never mentioned either. She rang him back two days later about something else and was completely normal and warm and the whole thing has never been raised by anybody.

He did the same to God about the same matter. Not twice. He would put the number somewhere north of forty, over about nine years, and it has the same architecture every time: the thing gets said, and then within a day or so it gets said again, better, with the parts he thought of afterward.

He believes he was forgiven the first time. He would say that to anybody.

If you have called back to improve on something already received, this is written for you. And I want to read you a promise that is mostly quoted in half, because the half nobody quotes is about exactly this.

Nobody has to keep telling anybody

Here is the verse, whole.

And they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man his brother, saying, Know the LORD: for they shall all know me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them, saith the LORD: for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.

The part everybody quotes is the last clause. It is glorious and it deserves the attention.

The part almost nobody quotes is the first one, and it is a promise about re-transmission.

They shall teach no more every man his neighbor, saying, Know the LORD.

Under the old arrangement the knowing had to be passed along. It went from person to person, and it needed maintaining, and if the chain broke somewhere the message stopped arriving, and so people had to keep saying it to each other because the delivery could not be assumed.

And God says: that ends. Not because teaching is bad, but because the knowing will be direct, from the least of them to the greatest, with nothing in between requiring upkeep.

Then He gives the reason. For I will forgive their iniquity. The direct knowing rests on the settled forgiving.

You are inside an arrangement where nothing has to be passed along again to make sure it arrived. Jeremiah 31:34 abolishes the re-transmission and grounds it in a settled forgiving, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written arrangement and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands in a parked car.

Now, I have to be careful, because a man who has done this forty times could hear it as a rebuke and it is not one.

Nothing here forbids you to pray about it again. God is not tired of you. He has never once received you with anything less than complete attention, and He is not going to start now. Bring Him anything as often as you want for the rest of your life.

The verse does not touch the may. It touches the must.

You have had a necessity lifted rather than a habit criticized, and those two are not related at all. It is written as an abolition of the need for re-sending and not as a word against anybody who sends again, and His Spirit is the one carrying a lifted necessity into a life, which is why it holds on an evening when you left the second one.

A second message assumes the first did not arrive

There is something worth naming about what a second voicemail is, and it is not about sincerity.

Nobody leaves a second message because the first one was insincere. A second message is always, without exception, a statement about delivery. It says: I am not confident that arrived, or arrived intact, or arrived in a form that will be understood correctly.

And that is a perfectly reasonable thing to be unsure about with a telephone, because telephones drop things.

It is not a reasonable thing to be unsure about here, and the verse says why. The knowing is direct. There is no chain, no relay, nothing in the middle that could fail, and no version of this where a thing was said to God and went astray on the way.

That is not a comment on your faith. It is a comment on the architecture, which is much better than the one you were assuming.

You are on a direct line with nothing in the middle that could drop anything. Scripture says they shall all know me, from the least to the greatest, with nothing intervening, and the same Spirit at work in that covenant is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the calling back has grown into something that governs your weeks, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past regret and toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Call your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be in it with you. That is not a lesser road than prayer and it is not a fault in your faith. God has always worked through people, and one sitting across from you is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

The parts you thought of afterward

I want to say something about the two extra sentences, because I think that is where the real ache lives.

He thought of them in the car. They were good sentences. They were more precise than what he managed the first time, and something in him said that the more precise version was the one that ought to be on the record.

That instinct is not vanity. It is a man who wants the thing said properly because the thing matters to him.

But the promise in Jeremiah does not run on precision. It is not: I will forgive their iniquity once it has been described adequately. There is no clause anywhere about the quality of the account, and God is not sitting with the first draft in front of Him wishing it had been better organized.

The parts you thought of afterward were already covered by the first version, because the first version was not a submission being assessed. It was a person turning to somebody who already had the whole of it.

You had it covered before you found the better words, and no version of it was ever being marked. Jeremiah 31:34 attaches the forgiving to God's own undertaking and never to the adequacy of anybody's account, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

I am not going to tell you the second call stops. Nine years of a thing goes at its own pace and if you leave another one next month it would not mean anything failed. Anybody who hands you a schedule made it up.

You are clean right now with the better sentences still in your head, and the better sentences change nothing in either direction. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.