The Wall Phone and the Written Heart

 816-397-26XX.

That sequence of numbers is etched into the gray matter of my brain (I x'd out the last two numbers for privacy), deeper than my social security number or my wedding anniversary. It was my childhood landline. Of course, back then, we didn’t call it a "landline." It was just the phone. The concept of a number that wasn't physically tethered to a specific wall in a specific house didn't exist.

I don’t know when my parents finally disconnected that line, but the memory of it is visceral. I can still see the phone hanging on the wall at the bottom of the stairs in our basement. It was a rotary phone, meaning every call required patience and precision. If you messed up the spin on the last digit, you hung up and started over.

If you wanted a private conversation, you didn’t walk into your bedroom or go outside. You sat on the mismatched patchwork carpet of the stairs, curling your body to accommodate the five-foot radius of the curly cord. That cord was your leash, and that spot on the stairs was your world.

There was an etiquette to it. You didn’t have Caller ID to screen your interactions; if the phone rang, you answered it, stepping into the unknown. We carried dozens of phone numbers in our heads because we had to. We knew the numbers of our best friends, our grandparents, the local pizza place.

Somewhere along the way, we traded that internal storage for external convenience. I have long since lost the ability to hold a Rolodex in my mind. I rely entirely on my smartphone to be my memory. My wife, Gina, is the outlier—she still manually types in numbers, a stubborn holdout of muscle memory in a digital world. But for the rest of us, if the device is lost, the connection is lost.

And while I love the convenience, I can’t help but wonder if we are paying a hidden cost. By making information effortless, do we risk a kind of spiritual atrophy?

The Evolution of Memory

Throughout history, the way we handle information has shifted. In Biblical times, scripture was primarily shared by oral tradition. Jewish children were expected to commit vast portions of the Torah to memory. This wasn't just devotion; it was necessity. At that time, literacy was often a status symbol, a skill reserved for the wealthy or the elite. You couldn't just pop down to the market and buy a scroll; if you wanted to possess the Word, you had to carry it inside you.

Then came the printing press, the great leveler. It democratized knowledge, making the written word accessible to the masses. We moved from the oral tradition to the written page.

And now, we have moved to the digital screen. Today, we have access to more theological data than any generation in history. I can pull up any Bible verse in any translation, cross-reference it with the original Greek or Hebrew, and read ten commentaries on it—all within seconds.

But this ease of access masks a potential danger.

There is a distinct difference between knowing the truth and knowing where to find the truth. It is the difference between knowing where someone lives and actually knowing the person. You can have someone’s address stored in your GPS, but that doesn’t mean you are welcome at their dinner table.

The Storage Problem

The Psalmist writes in Psalm 119:11 (NASB), "Your word I have treasured in my heart, That I may not sin against You."

He doesn’t say, "Your word I have written on a scroll and stored on a shelf in case I need to reference it later." He says he has treasured it in his heart. The Hebrew idea here implies hiding it away, storing it up like a supply for a siege.

When we outsource our memory to our devices, we stop doing the hard work of "treasuring." We risk relying on the search bar rather than the Spirit. But truth that is merely accessible isn't the same as truth that is internalized.

• Internalized truth is there when the crisis hits and you don't have time to look up a verse.

• Internalized truth shapes your subconscious reactions and your character.

• Internalized truth is the "Sword of the Spirit" ready in your hand, not a sword left in the scabbard back at the library.

We have gained the whole world of information, but we must be careful not to lose the soul of knowledge. We know about God because the data is at our fingertips, but do we know God?

Choosing the Friction

To be honest, I don’t miss that rotary phone. I don’t miss sitting on the basement stairs, and I certainly don’t miss the anxiety of answering a call not knowing who was on the other end. I love that I have the world in my pocket.

But I do miss what that friction produced.

The effort required to memorize a number meant that the number became part of me. The friction created retention. In our spiritual lives, the friction has been removed. We don't have to memorize scripture to find it. We don't have to meditate on a passage to understand it; we can just read a blog post about it.

Perhaps we need to intentionally re-introduce some friction into our walk with God. Maybe we need to stop being satisfied with having the Bible in our pockets and start doing the hard work of getting it back into our bloodstreams. The internet is a wonderful library, but it makes for a terrible heart.

Let us not be a generation that just knows how to search for the Master, but one that knows His voice.

The Only Thing That Wasn't Good

I’ve been wrestling lately with a question that seems simple on the surface but gets deeper the more you pull at the thread: Why did God create us?

It’s easy to say "for His glory," and that’s true, but it can feel abstract. I’ve tried to dig into Scripture to find the root of it—something I can pin down. I don’t believe God created us because He was lonely; God is self-sufficient. He doesn't need anything. But looking at the narrative of creation, I’ve become convinced that while He didn’t create us out of need, He absolutely created us for relationship.

The logic starts before humanity even takes a breath. In Genesis 1:26 (NASB), God says, "Let Us make mankind in Our image." Right there, in the very first mention of our design, we see community. God is speaking within the Trinity. He is relationship. So, if we are made in His image, we are made for relationship too.

This becomes the "proof in the pudding" when we get to Genesis 2. God creates a perfect world. He creates light, land, seas, and animals, and after each one, He declares it "good." But then, He looks at Adam—who is sinless, perfect, and in paradise—and says the opposite.

"It is not good for the man to be alone" (Genesis 2:18, NASB).

That stops me in my tracks every time. The only thing in a perfect universe that God labeled "not good" was solitude. Why? Because a solitary man cannot fully reflect a relational God.

To fix this, God didn’t create a servant for Adam; He created a partner. He made a relationship. This mirrors why God created us in the first place. Ephesians 1:5 tells us He "predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself." He wasn’t looking for employees to manage the garden; He was looking for a family to share it with. We see this in Genesis 3:8, where God is "walking in the garden in the cool of the day," seeking them out. He wanted the walk, not just the worship.

The Cost of the Walk

Tragically, Adam and Eve traded that intimacy for information. They wanted the autonomy of "knowing" good and evil rather than the safety of trusting God. They broke the relationship to gain control.

But this is where the logic of "Relationship" hits me the hardest. If the relationship was cheap, God would have just started over. Instead, He paid an infinite price to restore it. On the cross, Jesus cried out, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" (Matthew 27:46, NASB).

Jesus experienced the ultimate "not good"—total separation from the Father—so that we never have to. He took the isolation so we could have the adoption.

The Horizontal Proof

This restoration isn’t just about me and God, though. If we are restored to the image of a Triune God, that restoration must spill over into how we treat people. We cannot claim to have a "vertical" relationship with God while ignoring the "horizontal" relationship with others. As 1 John 4:20 (NASB) puts it, "for the one who does not love his brother whom he has seen, cannot love God whom he has not seen."

We need relationship with God because that is what we were created for, and we need relationship with each other because we were created in His image.

Co-Laboring

This even changes how I view my work. Adam wasn’t just given a wife; they were given a garden to tend together. Relationship grows through shared purpose. We aren't just God's children sitting around; we are His "fellow workers" (1 Corinthians 3:9). We experience this relationship most deeply not just when we are singing to Him, but when we are working with Him.

The Conclusion

This train of thought leads me to a sobering realization about eternity. If we were created for relationship, then "Eternal Life" isn't just living forever—it is the restoration of that relationship. As Jesus said in John 17:3, "This is eternal life, that they may know You."

Conversely, Hell isn’t just fire and brimstone; it is the total, finalized removal of that relationship. It is being "away from the presence of the Lord" (2 Thessalonians 1:9). It is the ultimate realization of "it is not good for man to be alone," stretched out for eternity.

The logic holds up: We were designed by a relational God, for a relationship with Him and with each other. When we try to walk alone—whether in life or in our spiritual walk—we aren’t just being independent. We are returning to the only state God ever called "not good."

We were made for the walk.

Prophetic Nostalgia

 

Homesick for the Future

We all know what nostalgia feels like. It is that warm, sometimes aching pull toward the past—a memory of a childhood home, a lost loved one, or a season of life that has slipped through our fingers. It is usually a backward glance.

But recently, my friend Scott shared a different perspective. He was talking about his upcoming grandchildren—children who haven’t even been born yet. As he spoke, you could hear a deep emotional longing for the things God was going to do in their lives. He described it as a "forward-thinking nostalgia."

He was missing a memory he hadn't made yet. He was homesick for a future that hadn't happened.

There is a German word that captures this feeling perfectly: Sehnsucht. It is often translated as "longing" or "yearning," but it means much more than that. It is the "inconsolable secret" in each of us—a longing for a far-off country that feels like home, even though we have never visited. We tend to think this feeling is about the past, but Scott was right: it is actually a prophecy. It is the echo of eternity that God has placed in our hearts. We aren't just missing what was; we are aching for what will be.

Phil Wickham captures this beautifully in his song, Homesick for Heaven. He sings about the strange paradox of missing a place you’ve never been:

"My heart belongs to a country and a King / Of a land I've always known but I've never seen."

When I hear this, I realize I’m not just listening to a song; I am engaging in what I like to call Prophetic Nostalgia. It aligns my heart with the reality that God has plans for us—and for our children's children—that are so real, we can feel them before they arrive.

The Bible is full of people who lived with this forward-facing homesickness. They didn't just stumble through life; they walked toward a promise they could see on the horizon. The writer of Hebrews describes the great heroes of faith this way:

"All these died in faith, without receiving the promises, but having seen them and having welcomed them from a distance, and having confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth." — Hebrews 11:13 (NASB)

They "welcomed them from a distance." That is the key. Just as Scott welcomed the destiny of his unborn grandchildren, I want to learn to welcome the plans God has for me.

I don't want to spend my life trying to recreate the "glory days" of the past. I want to live in the place where I am looking forward to the things God has in store for me. I want to walk out His plans for today while eagerly awaiting the "more" He has promised. If I feel that ache—that sense that I don't quite fit—I am choosing to see it as a gift. It is my spirit recognizing its true home, keeping me moving forward, homesick for the heaven that is coming to meet me.