October 16, 2025 // Columns

Call Upon Me

Molly Jo Rose

The other day, my phone rang. When I picked up, the friend on the other end opened with an apology. Instead of “Hello” or “How are you?” or “Is this a bad time?” she said, “I’m sorry I’m calling you,” as in, “I’m sorry I didn’t just text and now you have to deal with me in real time.”

Similarly, another friend called recently and when I answered the phone, she was annoyed. “Oh,” she said, “You answered. I was planning on leaving you a message.”

The phone call is dead. Long live the phone call. The case for calls in a world that loves the supposed ease of text is a difficult one to make, yet there is an inestimable value to the dying art of the phone conversation that should not be abandoned.

The arguments against engaging in phone calls are easy to make. Phone calls interrupt our days, they’re not as efficient as other modes of communication, and they can be challenging to people who are uncomfortable with the intimacy and speed of real-time conversations. As a writer, I would never suggest that texting is not a useful way to communicate. Rather, I am arguing that there is a deep loss in human intimacy when we use it to the exclusion of the phone call.

One of the most ready objections to phone calls is that they demand our immediate attention. In a culture that demands ruthless efficiency, we are not interested in surrendering our time in flexible and unpredictable ways. It is true that there is an elasticity to phone calls that makes them an uneasy enterprise. Yet it is this unknown commitment that makes phone calls so important, as it is in that malleable space where we can both talk and be quiet with each other, where we have the time to hear and be heard in all our complicated nuance.

Perhaps the most egregious phone call averse behavior is when someone who has been called responds with a text that asks, “What do you need?” The subtext of the question is astonishing in its commitment to efficiency. What it says is: I’m not going to make time for you right now unless you can prove that it is really important. Ironically, it’s that very question – what do you need? – that gets to the heart of what we lose when we stop being available to people who call us. What we need is connection. What we need is to know we’re valued, that if we call someone, we won’t be treated like a nuisance.

The truth is we are not saving time with texting. It demands our time in a way the humble phone call never dreamed possible. The immediacy we loathe in phone calls, we are slaves to in texting. According to USA Today, the average adult spends 23 hours a week texting, which means one full day of our week is spent with our heads bent over screens, immune to our immediate surroundings as we robotically dash off quick responses. Texting is an extraordinary tool for quick communication, but its very nature is determined by less. A poet lives in compression saying more with less, but there is no art to texting. Language is hobbled and replaced by emojis and acronyms that meagerly express a limited range of human expression and intent. Texting is famine communication when our souls want feast.

In reflecting on some of the greater horrors of imperialism, Joseph Conrad says, “What saves us is efficiency – the devotion to efficiency.” Conrad is referring to the modern religion of efficiency and how its practice has allowed us to be inhuman in our worldly pursuits. The problem is that our souls are not modern. They are meant for eternity, not efficiency. Texting demands that we force ourselves into small soundbites to relay the most efficient bits of information possible. But our souls are not truncated pieces of equipment. They are boundless mimeographs of Christ. We need a way to connect with those around us that mimics the boundlessness of the soul and that allows us to hear the echoes of Christ in one another.

Being open to spontaneous phone calls requires a sacrifice of personal time and energy. While our work life does not allow us to be constantly available to one another, our default mode outside of our workday should not be efficiency. As Christians, it should be an openness to God’s plan. Psalm 91 says: “He will call upon me, and I will answer Him. I will be with Him in trouble, I will deliver Him and honor Him.” God’s plan for us is to be His hands and feet, but more than that, we are also His ears and mouth. To be with one another in times of trouble, we must be willing to answer when someone calls. Sometimes, uncomfortably, that means answering a phone call that might last more than five minutes.

Nobody said being Christ to one another would be easy, and no one guaranteed that answering His call would be easily scheduled into our days. God isn’t polite like that. Being open to people is a spiritual practice, one that demands a surrender of time to build communion with others. The guarding of self and time that has become the cultural standard is antithetical to this communion. So go on. Be impolite like God. Call someone out of the blue. When they ask what you want, ask them how they are. Sit in silence until the person on the other end realizes this is not an exercise in efficiency, but an exercise in human connection.

Molly Jo Rose is a writer and English professor living with her husband and three children in Fort Wayne, where they are parishioners at St. John the Baptist. She walks a lot and writes a little.