In or Out of Touch

"Do you have the cell phone?" I asked my husband as he locked the front door.  We had  at last gotten ready for our trip and had already put the suitcase in the trunk of the car.  He frowned and said he thought I had it.

"Let's go back in and look for it," I said resignedly. "Remember, you had it when you were talking to Jamie a few minutes ago," I reminded him, trying to retrace the phone's path.  Well, he couldn't remember putting it down, so I searched in every conceivable place: the kitchen counter, the bookshelf with its dark, concealing finish, the bathroom, both bedrooms, the desk, the coffee table.

"We can't leave without it!" Howard declared, which I knew was true.  We were headed to Norman, Oklahoma, the first leg of our trip to Texas.  From there we would take the "Heartland Flyer" for an easy train ride to Ft. Worth.  Our kids would meet us there for a short week-end of fun and family fellowship.

After searching the car, Howard glanced across the street to a house remodeling project where painters were going in and out.  "I'm going to ask them if  they will use their cell phone to call our number.  You go in and listen for it to ring," he instructed me.

Soon he was back, carrying the neighbor's phone in his hand.  I had come out of the house with the admission that I hadn't heard anything.  "Maybe it's in the suitcase!  Ring it again!" I stood by the car trunk, but heard nothing.  "Let's look and see, anyway," I said.

Feeling a little foolish, I unzipped the suitcase.  There it lay, plain as day on top of a pink sweater! Then I remembered finding a scarf I had been searching for, unzipping the packed bag and putting it in.  I had had the phone in my hand then!

As we drove away, I looked at the phone dial, seeing we had missed a call, which was of course Howard calling from across the street.  I wondered about a voice message it showed, though, so I pressed the button, only to hear static, then my own muffled voice!  "Did you let it ring?" I heard myself say, and Howard answering in a fuzzy reply!  It was the conversation we had when he  had come back from across the street! Had the phone picked it up through the trunk?  Weird!  Anyway, we laughed and were just thankful we had found it.

This inanimate object speaking to us from the trunk, you might say, made me think of an illustration our pastor used in his sermon last Sunday.  When he got up to preach, an usher placed a huge, decorative boulder from the flower border out front on the altar.  It had been inscribed with with the words, "Jesus Loves Me", a message those entering the building saw every Sunday.  The sermon was entitled, "Substitute Praisers," from the passage where Jesus said that if the people did not praise Him, the very stones would cry out.

Also, it was a reminder that every word we speak is no doubt being recorded somehow on the the ether waves of time, or some other way in God's universe, possibly to be replayed back to us someday, giving us pause as to what we say and how we conduct our speech.  Like our pastor said, may we never let the stones speak for us!