I Wanted To Call Home About A Leaf

You picked the phone up twice.

Both times you put it down, and both times the reason was the same. You could not work out how to say it.

There is a new leaf on my plant.

Said to somebody four thousand miles away who has not seen your kitchen and does not know what the windowsill looks like, it sounds like a man who has run out of things to report. It sounds like somebody whose life has become small enough that a leaf is the news.

And that is not how it feels here. Here it was genuinely good. But there is a distance between what a thing is and what it sounds like when it crosses an ocean, and you have been standing in that distance for two days.

So let me say the thing that matters most before anything practical.

What you want to give them is not a report on your circumstances.

A good report maketh the bones fat

Proverbs has a line about news and what it does to a body, and the image is deliberately physical.

The light of the eyes rejoiceth the heart: and a good report maketh the bones fat. (Proverbs 15:30, King James Version)

A good report maketh the bones fat.

You are holding a thing that does something in another person's body, and no piece of good news has ever once been too small to do that work. Proverbs 15:30 says a good report maketh the bones fat, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says that over a man who has put a phone down twice.

Look at how physical the claim is. Bones. Marrow. The deepest and least visible part of a person.

A good report does not cheer somebody up. It goes further in than that, and the verse reaches for the least accessible tissue in the body to say so.

And there is no size threshold anywhere in it. The verse does not say a significant report, or news proportionate to the distance it travels. A good report.

You were never required to have something substantial before you were allowed to call, and the measure in that verse has never once been the size of the thing. The Spirit of God is what makes that land on a man holding a phone, and Proverbs 15 is where the bones are written down.

What they are actually receiving

Now the practical half, and it is about what crosses the ocean.

The content of that call is not the leaf. It never was.

What crosses is that their son, or their brother, four thousand miles away, in a life they cannot see, noticed something small and green in his kitchen and it made his week better and he thought of them while he was pleased.

That is what arrives. The leaf is the vehicle. And a family a long way off does not get much of that. They get the large news, which they would get anyway, and they get the ordinary reassurances. They almost never get a small good thing, unfiltered, from an ordinary Tuesday.

You have something in your hand that they almost never receive, and an unfiltered Tuesday has never once been a lesser gift than a piece of large news. Proverbs 15:30 measures by the good in a report, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a man what is actually valuable to carry across water.

You are holding the rarest kind of news a distant family ever receives, and a small good thing from an ordinary day has never once been what makes a life sound diminished. What is written in Proverbs 15:30 measures by the good rather than by the magnitude, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a man what actually crosses the water.

And there is a second thing, about how it will land, which is worth being practical about.

Say it first. In the first minute, before anything else.

Because a small piece of good news mentioned at the end, after the health and the weather and the practicalities, sounds like a man scraping the bottom of the call. The same sentence said in the first minute sounds like a man who called because he had something to say.

You are able to change entirely how it lands by saying it first, and the position of a sentence in a call has never once changed whether it was worth saying. The Spirit of God is the one who gives a man that kind of practical help, and Proverbs 15 is the ground under the good report.

Call them today

So here is the instruction and the timing is the whole of it.

Call them today. And say it in the first minute.

There is a new leaf on my plant and I was more pleased about it than I expected.

Then move on. Ask about them, talk about whatever you talk about, let the call be a normal call.

You are able to hand it over and let the call carry on being ordinary, and a sentence dropped in early has never once needed the rest of a call built around it. Proverbs 15:30 says a good report maketh the bones fat, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man while the line connects.

Do not explain the telling. Do not say I know it is nothing. Do not apologize for the smallness of it, which is what the two put down phones were. And do not wait to see whether they make anything of it. They may not. The thing has already happened by then.

You are able to give one small good thing away without managing how it is received, and a sentence said in the first minute has never once needed a reaction to have done its work. Proverbs 15:30 says a good report maketh the bones fat, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a man dialing four thousand miles at an ordinary hour.