I dropped me cell phone again and this time I really, really shattered the screen. The kind of shattering that makes the display all funky, and bits of glass fall off. It started making random calls to clients, my mother, my wife, and who knows who else. I had to shut it down.

This was the second time in a month, I have cracked this phone's screen. The first time I had it repaired locally, and was without it for what seemed like years, but two or three days. It was never right after that, but it was ok. I compare it to a closed head injury. Things are never really right after a closed head injury. I just couldn't do speakerphone any more.

Now, I have been without my phone for two days. And that is pathetic.

Not that I have been without my phone but I need it so much. I walk by the phone on the counter and feel sadness—not for the phone but from being disconnected from the world through the phone.

These devices entered my life after we moved to Abilene in 1993.

Before that, I spent three hours on the road making hospital visits in Amarillo and occasionally checked in to see if anyone else had come the hospital since I had left. It was a simpler time. I could pray and sing, and be quiet.

I remember as the boys were getting on to middle school, I told the secretaries at the church that if my children or wife called, to put them through no matter what I was doing or who I was talking to. It was one of my finer moments as a husband and parent. You see, pastor's wives and children often find themselves pushed away when the church gathers because someone has to speak to the pastor with some urgent matter. So pastor's wives and children can feel a lack of significance especially when compared to others in the congregation. Sadly, tragically, it also happens to children of missionaries. I saw that several times after we moved to Abilene, and each time, it grieved me.

When we moved to Abilene, the guys were getting older, Anna went to work, and I became the chauffeur dropping off and picking up the guys at the end of the day. Life in Abilene was busier, and Anna and I were taking classes at HSU for our counseling degrees, so life was complicated. So first I got a pager, and then a voice pager, and then a clunky Motorola cell phone so I was available to the family but especially the guys. I pretty well had Anna nailed down to a desk, so keeping up with her wasn't much trouble, but the guys, well, sometimes they needed me and I was on the 8^th floor at Hendrick Medical Center visiting someone. If my pager went off in a patient's room, they just thought I was really, really in demand, but not necessarily in the way they imagined. The guys needed a ride.

The guys grew up, stopped calling for a ride, got on with their lives as they had been encouraged to do, and the clunky cell phone got smaller and smaller and harder and harder to keep up with. I don't exactly remember when the phone became a necessary appendage to my body. It wasn't in Abilene, because the technology was still pretty new and no one in the church had my cell phone number. I could do some incredibly stupid things, but putting out my cell number was not one of them. It wasn't when I ran the Mental Health Department at Polunsky because only the Wardens could carry cells on their persons.

So, I guess it happened ever so slightly after the summer of 2014 when I grew, unknowingly, another appendage which hard wired me to a phone and then a “smart” phone. It was like a rash that over time sneaks up on you. I have lost count of how many “smart” phones I have had, but I know exactly how many I have broken by cracking the face. I am seriously thinking of making a case which surrounds this phone in bubble wrap. It may look a little funny in my pocket, but if it works. . . . .