The meal delivery arrived at six. The flowers had come that morning, already arranged, already paid for. Her phone kept lighting up on the table beside her. Sweet things like these: praying for you, thinking of you, let me know what you need. None of it was false. None of it was wasted. When the house went quiet again, the food was still warm and the flowers were still standing, and the person who had always been in the chair across from her was still gone.
Sending has less friction these days.
That’s not really an argument against the sending. Paul wrote letters when he could not travel. John was no stranger to a pen either: a Gospel, three letters, a vision no one has fully unpacked since. But near the end of one of those short letters, John admits something almost embarrassing for someone who wrote that much: “Though I have much to write to you, I would rather not use paper and ink. Instead I hope to come to you and talk face to face, so that our joy may be complete” (2 John 12, ESV). He is not confessing that the letter failed. He is naming its ceiling. Something in a friendship will not travel through paper, however well the paper is written.
Paul gives us the fuller picture. Writing to the church at Thessalonica, he says: “So, being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thessalonians 2:8, ESV). Notice its two objects. The gospel of God. And our own selves. Paul did not choose between truth and presence, sending one and keeping back the other. He handed over both, and the second gift is the one no courier can carry for him.
We tend to automate some of the effort of caring because technology has made it extremely easy, and that’s not usually about hiding from guilt when we let an app stand in for a visit. Most days it’s simpler than that: we’re tired, or unsure what to say, or genuinely stretched past what one person can give in a week. That much is honest, and it deserves to be treated honestly. But underneath the fatigue there is often a quieter arithmetic running: if the message went out, the debt is paid, and the evening is ours again.
Jesus told a story about that arithmetic once, though the man in it never touches a phone. A priest had somewhere to be. A Levite had somewhere to be. Then: “But a Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was, and when he saw him, he had compassion. He went to him and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he set him on his own animal and brought him to an inn and took care of him” (Luke 10:33–34, ESV). Every verb in that sentence has a body attached to it.
This is what a phone was never built to carry: the presence of a hand that closes firmly around another hand. Arms that actually surround someone, not a message that only says they are surrounded. Eyes meeting eyes long enough for something true to pass between them. A voice, not a notification, saying soft, comforting words a screen can display but never speak.
Calling for help now might be wiser than personally lifting a stranger onto a donkey. Wisdom was never all that opposed to a faster tool. The question the parable actually asks is narrower than that, and harder to answer: did the need reach far enough to bend your schedule, or only far enough to reach your contacts list?
Some days the honest answer is that it didn’t reach far enough. Sometimes that’s just a limit — a person only has so much reach in a day. And sometimes, if we’re honest, love actually fails. Christ carried what no one else could, including the times our love falls short of what we meant it to be.
That’s what the Incarnation actually is: not merely a message about God’s presence, but God’s presence itself. “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, ESV). God did not send flowers ahead of himself. He came and stayed.
So is the answer to put the phone down and show up for every hurting person who crosses your path? It is not, and calling it obedience would only be a different kind of exhaustion that has learned to dress for church. Paul could give himself away because he was never the source of what he was giving: “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19, ESV). Grace does not excuse us from carrying one another’s burdens. It frees us from believing we must carry what only Christ can. We are servants at the empty chair, not the Savior who can fill it.
Somewhere tonight a phone is lighting up on a table. The message on it is true. The flowers are real. The meal is warm.
None of that can answer the one question that matters tonight: is there a chair, in a house you could actually reach, still waiting on the gift Paul once called our own selves.
Scripture references: 2 John 12 · 1 Thessalonians 2:8 · Luke 10:33–34 · John 1:14 · 1 John 4:19 (all ESV)
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