Years ago, not all phones were private lines. Some of us had party lines. A party line, as strange as it may seem today, was literally a shared telephone line. Not shared between the living room and the bedroom, but between homes. Yep, that’s right. You had one line and you had your home phone attached to it and it ran on the telephone pole to your neighbor’s house and they had their phone hooked up to that same line. If you were on the phone and your neighbor picked up their phone, they could hear your conversation, just as if they had picked up the extension in another room of your house.
Seems kind of incredible now, doesn’t it? Nonetheless, it was reality, back in the day. The only way you knew if the call was for you or not was by the ring. Back then, of course, phones had bells, not “ringtones” like today. Your home would be assigned a ring sequence. One home, for example, might have a sequence of two long duration rings, a pause and two more. That sequence would repeat until the phone was answered, or the calling party got sick of waiting on the other end for someone to answer. There were also no answering machines or voicemail services back then. Your neighbors ring sequence would be different, perhaps a long duration ring, followed by a short duration ring, neighbor three might have yet another.
The risk, of course, was that someone in another house could listen in on your conversations rather easily. An advantage was that if you were waiting for an important call and had to go out, you could ask your neighbor to pick up the phone for you and relay or take a message.
Apparently, it has been deemed that the disadvantages outweigh the advantages in the party line option, because I don’t know of any that exist today.
One could become quite adept at answering the phone at the virtually the same time as your neighbor. As a child, I always thought it was a cool thing to do, sort of James Bond-ish. I never really had much interest though in what the neighbors talked about with their friends, so eventually I just stopped doing it. What they did was their business and I really didn’t have any interest in getting involved in it. Knowing all of this, however, did tend to make you cautious of what you said on the phone to your friends. You just never really were sure who might be listening.
God has access to our personal thoughts and our conversations with others, but He isn’t into meddling or spreading gossip. He’s more interested in filling our hearts with His love to help what comes out of our mouths become more and more loving and kind. Remember, the Bible teaches us: Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks.
God Himself is often calling our number, even though the message that He’s sending is broadcast over the party line of humanity. It is a wise person who learns to recognize the sound of the ring sequence that God is using to call their number. It is a still wiser person who answers the phone. The wisest of all will listen to what is spoken into their heart from God and will allow that message to be the one which they then carry forth in love.
There’s an old joke of the cell phone ringing during the Pastor’s message. He states, “That had better be Jesus calling.”
Jesus is calling. Hey, did I just hear two long rings or was that a long and a short? Blessings!
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