The Voice They Use When They Want Something

The phone goes at ten past eight on a Tuesday evening and Bernadine knows before she picks it up.

She is not psychic. It is the hour. Nobody calls her at ten past eight to say hello, and there is a certain kind of call that comes on a weeknight after the kids are down and before the person calling loses their nerve. She looks at the name lighting up the screen on the arm of the chair. She lets it go two rings, which is the whole of her rebellion. Then she picks it up.

Three words. That is all she needs. "Hey, you busy?" said bright, said high, said with a little laugh at the end of it, and there it is. She knows this voice the way you know a song from the first two notes. It is not the voice this person uses at Christmas. It is not the voice they use when they are telling her about their week. It is the warm one, the fond one, the one that arrives with something already in its hand, and Bernadine has been fluent in it for about thirty years.

She says no, not busy. She is always not busy.

And then she listens while it comes, and it is the airport at four in the morning on Thursday, and would she mind, because the parking there is a nightmare and she is so good about things like this.

She says of course. She says it easily and warmly and without a beat of hesitation, because she is not a martyr and she does love them, and she will be there at four with the heater on and a travel mug of coffee she made for somebody else.

Then she hangs up and sits in her own living room with the lamp on and the television muted, and something goes through her that she has never found a good word for.

It is not anger. She has checked. It is closer to being a thing rather than a person. It is what a ladder feels like in a garage: useful, valued in a way, remembered exactly when needed and not otherwise. In three decades nobody has called her at ten past eight on a Tuesday because they wanted her opinion, or wanted her company, or wanted her. They call because she is available and because she has never once said no, and now her availability has hardened into a fact about the world that nobody even notices anymore. Her name in that family means yes. It has meant yes since she was nineteen.

You know that voice. You know it from the first three words and you have never told anybody that you know. And you answer it anyway, every single time, and then you sit in a quiet room afterward feeling like something that gets taken down off a hook. So before we go anywhere near what to do about it, here is what is already true. You are God's own, and He formed you for Himself before anybody worked out what you were good for. Isaiah 43:21 says the people He formed for Himself are to declare His praise, and the Spirit has been repeating the words for Himself in your ear every time that screen lights up.

Two words in the middle of that verse

Let us read the anchor slowly, because everything is in a phrase most people skip on the way to the end.

the people whom I formed for myself that they might declare my praiseIsaiah 43:21

For myself.

Not for the use of whoever gets there first. Not for the household that needs a driver at four in the morning. God says of a whole people that He formed them for Himself, and it is a possessive sentence, and it is meant to be. He is stating an ownership that predates every claim any human being has ever made on them, and He is stating it about people who at that point in their history had been used by three empires in a row.

Understand what that does. It does not make a person precious in the abstract. It settles a question of standing. If a person was formed for Him, then general property is not what she is, and the people who quietly filed her under available never had the authority to file her anywhere.

You have an owner and He is good, and no one has ever outranked Him for a single day of your life. It is written in Isaiah 43:21 that He formed this people for Himself, and the Spirit puts the weight exactly where the verse already put it instead of moving it somewhere more comfortable.

I want to be careful with the word owner, because it can land wrong on a woman who feels used. It is not the same kind of word. Being owned by the God who made you is the only ownership in existence that makes a person more free rather than less, because He is the one who formed the thing and knows what it is for, and He has never once treated you as a means to something else. Everyone else who has ever claimed you wanted an outcome. He wanted you. That is the difference and it is the whole difference.

You are wanted for yourself, and that was the case long before you were useful to anybody. Psalm 139:13 says He formed your inward parts and knitted you together in your mother's womb, and the Spirit does not let a verse like that get heard as flattery.

The difference between being loved and being used up

Now let me say plainly what this message is not, because on a subject like this people brace for an instruction and I do not have one for you.

I am not telling you to stop answering the phone. I am not telling you to have a conversation, write a letter, set out terms, or read anybody a list of what they have done. I am not going to hand you a confrontation from a distance and then close the laptop and leave you living with the aftermath of it. That is not ministry, and there is no homework assignment being handed out on this page tonight.

Nor am I going to prosecute the people who call you. I do not know them. Most of the time a family like that is not made of villains at all; it is made of ordinary people who were handed a yes so early and so consistently that they stopped seeing a person behind it. That is a real thing and it is not the same thing as malice, and either way it is not our business tonight, because the standing to settle that question was never theirs to hold.

Here is what I am doing instead. I am putting the question of ownership back where Scripture puts it, and letting everything else reorganize itself underneath that.

Because the drive to the airport is not the problem. Kindness is not the problem. You could get up at four in the morning for the next twenty years and be a magnificent woman doing it. The problem is what you are paying for with it. Right now that yes is not generosity, it is rent, and you are paying it to stay in a family that already has you. You were formed for God, and staying His is not a thing you have to keep earning by being useful. 1 Corinthians 6:19 says you are not your own, and the Spirit uses that sentence to set a woman free instead of tying her down further.