Beep…Leave a Message

I grew up with a rotary dial phone.  Mine was pumpkin orange.  I’m not sharing this to date myself but to share the simplicity of that particular device.  In fact, you only had to dial the last four numbers of the nine-digit number to reach any other phone in town.  It made it easy to remember thirty different phone numbers in your head at one time.  As a teenager, I exhausted many hours on our one family phone line jabbering with my friends.  There were no answering machines at that time.  If no one was home to answer the phone, it would ring on in perpetual anticipation until the caller made the disconnection.  It left us free to detach from the world of technology every time we left our house and to associate with people the old-fashioned way.

The time for such phone number memorization is over.  There are only two or three phone numbers that I can recall at this very moment.  My own cell phone number is not included among those.  I don’t have to remember them.  My cell phone recalls every number with the flick of a fingertip.  Most of my conversations aren’t carried through various towers by voice, they’re accomplished through text.  I feel pressure leaving the house without my phone in my purse or my pocket because I might miss an attempted connection. 

People talk and text constantly.  We answer our phones in restaurants, malls, and movie theaters.  People text in class, in the middle of face-to-face conversations with others, and while driving a two thousand pound car down the highway.  Sadly, the latter takes lives.  How have we become so dependent on digital gadgetry?  We are so intent on connecting with those in our cell phone directory that we tend to ignore those standing or sitting beside us.  We become self-absorbed and hardened to the world around us. 

I have learned through experience that the most important thing in this world is its people.  It doesn’t matter whether we’re young, old, rich, poor, extraverted or introverted.  Neither race nor religion matters.  People matter.  You matter.  The person next to you matters.  Will you put your phone down to look your neighbor in the eye?  A smile or a small touch can change someone’s day or change their outlook.  A kind word can has the power to change someone’s self-worth. 

It only takes a moment to acknowledge someone else.  Today, I am leaving my phone at home.  If you call, you’re hear my request for you to leave a message following the beep.  Please do.  I will get back with you.  Today my attention will be focused on those who God puts in my path.  Maybe tonight, I’ll have a new phone number to add to my directory.  And if not, I’ll be content knowing that today, I put others before myself.