I Just Talk

He was nine the first time. A clinic, a plastic chair too high for his feet, and his mother's hand on his shoulder while a doctor said a word he did not know and waited for him to turn it into something she could hold.

He got it slightly wrong that day. He has never entirely forgiven himself for it, which tells you most of what you need to know about him.

Since then: two lease signings, a bank, four parent meetings, a funeral director, an insurance claim after the flood, and more clinic rooms than he could count. He is thirty eight now. He still does it, and he still goes quiet in the car afterward for about ten minutes, and nobody in the family has ever asked him why.

His cousin thanked him at a wedding last month. Properly, in front of people, glass in hand, said the word carried and said his name.

And out it came, quick and warm and already loaded, the way you say a phone number.

Ah, no. I just talk.

Later, stacking chairs, there was the small drop. It has been happening so long he no longer names it, because naming it would feel like asking to be thanked twice.

If you have your own version of that sentence, the one that leaves your mouth before any part of you has decided, then you know the drop. And it is very likely that nobody has ever told you the sentence is not humility.

Somebody handed you a definition, and you kept it

Let me say the plain thing first, because you may have been waiting years for anybody to say it out loud in a room you were standing in.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It never was. Whoever gave you that gave it meaning well, and it was wrong.

And it was not foolish of you to take it. I want to be exact, because nothing else will get in until that is said. You took an instruction from people you loved, you kept it faithfully at real cost since you were nine, and keeping a badly worded instruction is loyalty aimed at the wrong number. There is nothing in the aiming to be ashamed of.

Now look at the story Jesus told about things being handed out, because you are in it and probably not where you think.

And unto one he gave five talents, to another two, and to another one; to every man according to his several ability; and straightway took his journey.Matthew 25:15

Notice the phrase that does all the work. According to his several ability. The distribution was not random and it was not a mistake. The master looked at each man, saw what he could carry, and handed over exactly that. You were handed something on purpose, measured to what you could carry, and the handing was a decision somebody made about you. That is not my compliment. It is written in Matthew 25:15, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a man's ears into the place where he actually lives.

And notice what goes wrong in the story. Nobody is faulted for having two instead of five. The comparison never arises. The only man in trouble is the one who took what he was given, decided it was too small to matter, and put it in the ground.

Which is why the sentence I just talk is worth looking at squarely. You have been burying the thing in the ground with a kind voice, and unburying it is obedience rather than ambition. The word settled that long before you learned to translate, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

The measure was set by the One who handed it over

Here is the part almost everybody misses. The measure in that story is not the size of the pile. It is the faithfulness of the man with the pile he was actually given. The two talent man hears exactly the same sentence as the five talent man, word for word, and gets exactly the same joy.

So the arithmetic you have been running, the one that concludes that talking is not a real thing because other people do harder work, was never on the master's page. He set the amounts. He set them according to ability, which means yours was set by somebody who knew.

Anybody who has ever kept books for a family knows what happens next. A figure written up beyond its worth is a false entry. A figure written down below its worth is exactly the same false entry facing the other way. Both wrong. Only one of them gets called modest.

You were never asked for a small account of yourself, and you were never asked for an inaccurate one. The written word asks for faithfulness with what was actually handed over, and His Spirit is the one who makes a man able to look at his own life without flinching in either direction.

And nothing here is handing you self-promotion instead. I am careful about that, because a man who has spent thirty years going down is not helped by being told to start going up. That is the same false entry the other way round and it is just as tiring. Humility is not a size at all. It is a posture: a man standing at his true measure in front of a God who is immeasurably larger, and knowing exactly which of the two of them is which.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you keep yourself small is that somebody near you makes you pay for taking up space, nothing here is telling you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.