I hate phones

This is a continuation of Daniel’s and my story. Click on the “Our Story” tag for context.

Is it not just the nature of God to not allow us to become comfortable or complacent in any season of our lives? Just when I came to a peace with the correspondence between Daniel and I, things changed.

Daniel asked if he could call me.

I agreed and we arranged for our first phone call.

He called and we talked for a little less than two hours. When we hung up, I drew my bathwater and cried.

It had been awkward, uncomfortable. I’ve never been a phone person, and this had been awkward on so many levels.

Sometimes he couldn’t hear me. Sometimes I couldn’t hear him. We had to ask each other to repeat what we’d said several times. There were awkward silences while we tried to figure out what we should say next. I was pretty sure I’d been an awful conversationalist, failing to do my part to keep the conversational ball rolling.

And I realized, somewhat to my surprise, that this really bothered me. I knew the odds of his being romantically interested in me after that conversation were slim-but I worried that now that he knew that, he wouldn’t want to correspond with me anymore. And that prospect was heartbreaking.

I loved corresponding about books and philosophy and science and the sovereignty of God with Daniel. And now I had ruined it.

I considered writing Daniel, apologizing for not having told him in advance how terrible I was at phone conversation. I wanted to salvage whatever I could.

But God urged me to trust Him, to let Daniel lead. So I told God my thoughts and did nothing.

You can’t imagine my elation when I received a message from Daniel two days later asking if he could call me again.

I had not lost my new friend, this man with whose mind mine had so connected.