Eight Years Of Swallowing It

It happens in the same place every time, which she has never told anybody.

Third song. Not the first, not the last. Somewhere in the third song something arrives, and it is usually about somebody specific, and it is usually one sentence long and completely ordinary.

Tell Marian she is not being punished.

He has not forgotten the thing you asked him in February.

The girl at the back who came in late is going to be all right.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing about the future. Nothing that could not be said by any reasonable person who happened to know a bit about somebody.

She has swallowed every one of them for eight years.

The reason is not that she thinks she is making them up, though she has told herself that on and off. The reason is what happens if she says one out loud. She would become a woman who thinks she hears from God, and she has met one or two of those, and she would rather be almost anything else.

So she stands there in the third song with a sentence in her mouth and she sings through it and it goes, and she is tired in a way that has nothing to do with the week.

If there is something you have been swallowing on a Sunday, you know exactly what I mean.

What it is actually for

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting eight years for anybody to say it.

Silence is not automatically humility. There is a real quiet that belongs to somebody who is weighing a thing carefully, and this page is not going to take it off you.

But eight years is not weighing. Weighing has an end.

Now read what Paul says the whole thing is for, because it removes almost everything you are afraid of.

But he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, and exhortation, and comfort.1 Corinthians 14:3

Three words and every one of them is about the other person. Building up. Encouragement. Comfort. That is the definition and there is nothing in it about predicting anything, nothing about standing out, nothing about the speaker at all.

Look at your three sentences against that list. Tell Marian she is not being punished. He has not forgotten February. The girl at the back is going to be all right.

Those are not prophecies in the sense you have been frightened of. They are comfort, which is the third word in the verse.

You are holding somebody else's comfort in your mouth, and it was put there to be handed on. That is not my encouragement. It is written in 1 Corinthians 14:3, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a woman's ears into the place where she actually lives.

So eight years of swallowing has not been humility. You have been given something addressed to somebody else, and delivering it is the whole of what it is for. The word settled that long before your first third song, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the building while you read this.

The women you are afraid of becoming

Here is worth handling honestly, because your fear is not irrational and I am not going to pretend it is.

You have met one or two people who wear it. Who make an announcement of it, who need a room to know, whose sentences are always slightly larger than the situation. It made you uncomfortable and you were right to be uncomfortable, and you decided at some point that you would never be that.

Good. Do not be that.

But notice what those people actually do, because it is not the speaking. It is the framing. It is I have a word for this church. It is the pause and the raised hand and the audience.

There is another way to do it entirely, and it does not require you to become anybody. You find Marian afterward by the tea and you say: this might be nothing, and it might not be for you, but I thought about you and I wanted to say that you are not being punished.

Nobody in the history of the world has ever come away from that sentence thinking the speaker was full of herself.

And if it is nothing, Marian says thank you and has a nice cup of tea, and no damage is done anywhere. That is the mercy in the small delivery: it costs almost nothing if you are wrong, and it is comfort if you are right.

You have permission to hand it over quietly, and the permission does not require you to be certain first. 1 Corinthians 14 defines it entirely by what it does for the hearer; His Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to say one sentence by a tea urn.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep quiet is that somebody near you punishes you for speaking, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Tell one person who can act. In the United States, 988 answers by call or text at any hour.