Tears suddenly welled up in her eyes as she paused in mid-sentence, changing the subject of our conversation completely.
“I would talk to my brother, two to three times a week,” she abruptly said, slowing her speech, glancing away with a far-away look in her eyes. “I miss him so much. I’ll hear a voice say, ‘Go ahead, make that call.’ So, I instinctively pick up the phone. And then I realize… he’s no longer there to call.”
My friend was talking about her brother, who died recently. She’s closing in on her eighth decade of life, so she and her brother had been close to each other longer than I’ve been alive.
“Go ahead, make that call.”
The words stuck with me the rest of the day.
“I’m going to do just that,” I determined.
My older brother, Mark, beat me to it.
“I was going to call you today, brother,” I said as I answered the phone, hoping he didn’t think I was just making conversation.
I meant it.
Then Lori called me at work.
A friend from way back when had left a message at home.
“He said he wanted to catch up with you and see how things are going…said he hadn’t heard from you in a long while.”
“Go ahead, make that call.”
It was the voice, whispering in my ear again.
The next day, another friend I hadn’t heard from in a long while text-messaged me. Her husband’s sister had just died. He, too, was a close friend. “He’s struggling with it,” her message read. “Can you call him at your earliest convenience?”
“Go ahead, make that call,” I once again heard the voice from within.
Then Lori asked me how someone in our church was doing.
I tried to explain the person’s physical challenges but wasn’t sure I understood the illness.
You guessed it: the voice beckoned me: “Go ahead, make that call.”
We did.
And we don’t regret it.
I know how it goes: you’re tired; it’s been a busy day; perhaps you’ve talked to so many people during the course of the day that you’ve lost track of how many you’ve seen. Or maybe you’re fatigued from focusing on the computer, or working on machinery, or teaching children.
“I know I should call,” you think, “but for now, I’ll just listen to this song while I drive home.” And once home, you retreat into your IPad, then maybe watch your favorite series on Netflix before texting your son or daughter, or mother or dad, just to make sure they’re okay. But you can’t bring yourself to call.
“I’ll call and talk tomorrow,” you promise yourself.
Tomorrow fades into the next day and the next.
And 275 emails, 431 text messages, 14 hours on social media and 8 hours on TV later, you’ve yet to talk to that person you know deep down you need to call.
Or maybe you’re surrounded by four walls that get seem to get closer and closer with the passing of each monotonous day. It seems all you can do anymore is stare. It’s been so long since you’ve called, you can’t seem to lift your hand to your phone. And now you’re afraid of what they might say, or worse—what they might not say.
And you don’t call.
Then YOU get THE call.
And it’s no longer possible to make that call, because they are no longer there.
Heed the words of my friend, the one who told me about the voice. She made the call, time after time, and still misses not being able to do that today.
So, go ahead, make that call.
Even if the conversation turns out to be less than meaningful and not as uplifting as you had hoped it would be, you still did your part.
You made the call.
And you never know the difference one call expressed with genuine concern can make.
So, I’m leaving now.
I just heard a voice.
“Go ahead, make that call.”