Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.—1 Peter 5:7 (NIV)

My husband and I deliberated a while about getting rid of our landline, which I used only for calling friends abroad since it was cheaper than using my cell phone. Then I got a plan that let me call anywhere for the same price. Kris still wanted to keep the landline, though, for possible middle-of-the-night emergency calls from our daughters, Charlotte and Lulu. We turn our cell phones off at night. 

But, I argued, Lulu hates phoning. To chat, we use her gaming app, wearing headphones she gave Kris and me one Christmas that light up in bright colors, like we’re wacky astronauts calling from outer space. And we may as well be. As Charlotte points out, she’d never call us in an emergency: “It’s not like you could help from two thousand miles away!” 

So, we got rid of the land line. Kris leaves his cell phone on all night, despite wrong numbers and clients so uncouth as to call after nine. I like having only one phone to manage, one number, one place where everything I need to know is located. 

Then, coming home from birding one day, I dropped my iPhone in our cattleguard, a deep water-filled hole in our driveway covered with gridiron to keep cows from crossing. In my own minor emergency, voiceless and cut off from even Kris, I prayed an inane prayer—“Oh, Father, let it not be dead!”—and trudged home, hopeless. 

Later, thinking even a dead phone might have trade-in value, I got Kris’s grilling tongs, lay on the cattleguard, and fished it out. Amazingly, it was still on—a technological miracle, surely, that nevertheless reminded me God hears even my silliest pleas.