I Have Not Raised My Hand In Two Years

She knows the answer. She usually knows the answer. That is not the interesting part.

The interesting part is what her hand does now. It starts, about an inch, from the desk. Then something catches it, and it goes back down and lies flat, and she looks at her book, and somebody else says something roughly right and the class moves on.

Two years of that.

It started in October of her second year, in a room of thirty, when a teacher who was tired and having a bad month said, not to her but about the general situation, that some people just like the sound of their own voice.

Nobody looked at her. That is what makes it so hard to explain to anybody: nobody looked at her, and everybody knew, and she knew, and she has not put her hand up since.

She still learns. She reads ahead. She has the highest coursework marks in her group and her teachers describe her, in reports, as quiet.

And at home she is not quiet at all. She is funny at the table and she argues about films and her brother cannot get a word in.

If your hand has stopped going up, wherever your version of the room is, you know exactly what I mean.

Who made the mouth

Let me say the plain thing before anything else, because you may have been waiting two years for anybody to say it.

Silence is not automatically humility. Sometimes it is, and there is a real and good kind of quiet that comes from having nothing to prove. But a mouth that has been shut by one sentence somebody said on a bad Tuesday is not humble. It is injured, and those two get confused constantly, and the confusion can last a whole life.

Now look at the argument God has with somebody who did not want to speak, because it is one of the most direct exchanges in Scripture and God does not lose it.

Moses says he is not eloquent. He says he is slow of speech and of tongue, and there is no reason to think he was lying.

Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.Exodus 4:12

God does not argue about whether Moses is eloquent. He does not say you are better than you think. He asks, one verse earlier, who made the mouth in the first place, and then He says go, and He attaches Himself to the instrument.

You have a mouth God made, and He has promised to be with it and to teach it what to say. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Exodus 4:12, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

So two years of the hand going back down has not been humility. You were given a voice on purpose, and using it is what it was given for. The word settled that long before that October, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the classroom while you read this.

What one sentence can do to a room

Here is the thing about that Tuesday, and it is worth being precise because you have been carrying it as information about yourself.

She was tired. She was having a month. She said a general sentence about a general problem, and it was aimed at nobody, and if you asked her today she would not remember saying it.

That is not an excuse for it. It is a description of its weight, and its weight was almost nothing. It weighed nothing when it left her and it has weighed two years on you, and that mismatch is the whole story.

A sentence with no aim landed on the person in the room most likely to take it seriously, which is what always happens, and which is why sentences like that should be said carefully by people who are tired, and are not.

And here is what it cost, and it is worth counting because you have never counted it. Two years of a class not hearing the thing you knew. Two years of your teachers writing quiet in a box. And two years of you learning, five times a week, that the safe move is to let somebody else say it roughly right.

That last one is the expensive one, because it is a habit now rather than a decision, and habits go with a person into every room afterward.

You have permission to say the true thing out loud, and the permission was given by the One who made the mouth rather than by anybody in that classroom. Exodus 4 has God attaching Himself to a reluctant instrument; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to speak when the room has gone quiet in the wrong way.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot speak is that somebody around you punishes you when you do, 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.