I Sent It And They Read It

It says read.

That is the part. Not that they did not get it. Not that it went to the wrong number. It says read, under the message, with a time on it, from eleven days ago.

And nothing came back.

And what has happened since is that you have built an entire interpretation out of one word under a message.

You are allowed to ask again, and one unanswered message has never once been the whole of what a person is permitted to say.

Let me say what the interpretation usually is.

They read it and decided not to answer. Which means they have decided about you. Which means asking again would be pushing, and pushing is the thing you have never wanted to be.

So one word under a message has become a decision somebody made about you, and you have obeyed it for eleven days.

And I do not know what happened at their end. Neither do you, which is the actual position, and the actual position is more open than the one you have been living in.

Though it tarry, wait for it

There is a line in Habakkuk about a thing that is delayed, and the instruction attached to it is not what most people expect.

For the vision is yet for an appointed time, but at the end it shall speak, and not lie: though it tarry, wait for it; because it will surely come, it will not tarry. (Habakkuk 2:3, King James Version)

Though it tarry, wait for it.

The word tarry there means to be slow, to delay, to take longer than expected. And the instruction is not to conclude something from the delay.

You are inside a verse where a delay is named and no meaning is assigned to it, and a thing that is late has never once been a thing that spoke. Habakkuk 2:3 says though it tarry, wait for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the waiting there instead of an interpretation.

And notice what the verse does with the waiting. It gives it a shape.

Two verses earlier the man has taken up a position to watch. He is not passively enduring the silence, he is stationed in it, with something to do.

You have a waiting that is allowed to have an action in it, and standing still has never once been the only thing available to somebody who has not heard back. The Holy Spirit is the one who is present in an active wait, and it is written in Habakkuk 2 with the man on the tower rather than in his house.

What a read receipt is not

Now let me take the word read apart, because it is doing far more work in your head than it can actually carry.

Here is everything that word tells you. A device belonging to that person had that message open on its screen at that time.

That is the complete list.

It does not tell you they read it properly. It does not tell you they were in a position to answer. It does not tell you what they thought. It does not tell you they made a decision.

You are treating a piece of technical information as a person's answer, and a word under a message has never once been a sentence somebody said to you. The written word declines to interpret a delay at all, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a fact from being inflated into a verdict.

And here is what most often actually happens, which people almost never find out because they never ask twice.

They opened it while driving, or at work, or in a shop. They meant to answer properly. The moment passed. Then a day passed, and then answering became more awkward than it would have been on the first day, and then the awkwardness itself became the reason not to.

By eleven days, they are not deciding anything. They are avoiding a thing that has grown.

You have been reading a decision where there is probably only a delay that grew teeth, and a silence that gets harder to break has never once been the same as a silence that means no. The Holy Spirit is the one who gets a second message sent that ends it for both people, and Habakkuk 2:3 leaves the tarrying uninterpreted.

One plain sentence, today

So the assignment, and for you the important thing is that it is a second one and that is allowed.

Send the message asking for it, today, in one plain sentence.

The work, the date, the ask. One line. Same as the first one, or shorter.

You are able to send a second message, and asking twice has never once been pushing in any trade anywhere. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a second attempt, and the written word tells a man to keep his position through a delay rather than to draw a conclusion from it.

And here is the specific wording, because your instinct will be to acknowledge the silence and that is the thing to avoid.

Do not write a line about how busy they must be. Do not write, sorry to message again. Do not write, I do not know if you got my last one, because they did get it and you both know it.

Just send the line. As though it were the first one.

You are able to send it clean with no reference to the eleven days, and a second plain message has never once needed to apologize for the first one. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person a level second sentence, and it is written in Habakkuk 2:3 that the waiting has a position in it rather than a conclusion.