This week has been a splendid one. More than just the typical, life of Britt, overly-excited-about-nothing kind of splendid. This one was full of new adventures at the summer job, a joy-filled evening catching up with a dear friend, a lot (and y’all, I mean a LOT) of commuting hours spent listening to podcasts, and three precious phone calls. All simple, and all sweet sweet sweet.
Oddly enough, of all those things, the phone calls are the ones that are closest to my heart. Every minute of this week was valuable to me. Even, maybe especially, the ones spent snoozing the time away in my cozy throne of rest. But the minutes spent on the phone are the ones that meant the most to me because of what they weren’t.
They weren’t a text in the middle of the afternoon.
They weren’t a Facebook message to myself and five other friends.
They weren’t a shout out in an Insta pic pointing out the highlight real of our time spent together.
They weren’t voiceless.
They were sweetly filled to overflowing with goofy expressions, giggly laughs, serious notes, fast talking, quiet listening, and reassuring sounds of attentiveness. They were my peoples’ voices. They were real instead of written, emotional instead of emotionless, stuttered instead of autocorrected, timeless instead of Times New Roman.
The first call was from a newer friend who just recently moved to Wisconsin. A new place with a new job and new faces yet still time for plain old me. That has meaning. To take time out of a new and busy life to catch up with me? Not just a half-minute here and there in an iMessage, but a full hour of time spent sharing about the mountaintops and valleys of life over the past few weeks.
The second came from an old friend who just moved back to Kansas for a while before adult-ing starts. In a place where family and high school friends are abounding, finding time to pause life for a bit and catch up over the phone is hard to come by. Again, so much value to me that the minutes in the day were spent sharing life in the only way we can while we are so far from each other.
The third came from Austin, Texas. It was from the long time best friend who is the most consistent person I have found in all my years stumbling around this earth. She is the Christina Yang to my Meredith Grey. The most touching part of our entire conversation was knowing that she wasn’t just lounging around with nothing to do when she decided to call. It wasn’t that moment of, “I am sitting on the couch on episode 10 (today) of New Girl and should do something slightly beneficial to my life.” It was nowhere near that. She was going from a summer job directly to evening plans with a friend, and chose to spend every free second of her commute to catch up with me about both of our new jobs. She could very well have just shot me a text to check in and gone on with her busy day, but hearing each others’ voices and excitement for where life has us is high on her priority list, as it is mine. Got to love a best friend who shares my same heart for life. Eeep, love you Kas.
Y’all three who called my celly-telly touched my life this week. Your voices blow any text message of any absurd length right out of the water.
I do not mean to sound at all like texting is rotten. It is a huge blessing this day and age to be able to contact people so quickly and quietly when life is crazy. I am not supporting a return to land-lines and corded phones on the kitchen wall.
My heart, and I imagine a lot of y’alls hearts, are for people. Not for a name and a stream of words on a screen, but for the personality behind those descriptors.
If it isn’t too much to ask, why don’t we start calling and talking, y’all? Like… REALLY talking. Let’s get back to having conversations about more than abbreviations and hashtags and the latest lingo. Let’s get back to loving our people with our words and with our listening, and letting that happen not only with those who we are blessed to live near enough to hang out with.
I am 21. I am a millennial. I am in the age of faceless anything and online everything.
And all I want is a ring. A buzz. A good, old-fashioned call.
So, praising Him for the blessings of technology and the connectedness of our generation. It may have changed how we interact in a lot of ways, but it also gives us such an incredible opportunity to actively choose to sacrifice time in our busy schedules to choose to continue investing in our people.
