Twenty Two Years Of Managing It Down

She was nineteen and she was in a corridor.

It had been a good night. Something had happened in that room that nobody planned, and she had been in the middle of it, and she had prayed out loud for a woman she had never met and afterward there had been a great deal of noise and joy and somebody had cried on her.

And in the corridor, afterward, a man she respected enormously put a hand on her shoulder and said, kindly, and with what he plainly believed was wisdom: you are a lot, you know. You want to watch that.

That is all he said. He probably thought he was doing her a service.

She has been watching it for twenty two years.

Not all at once. That is the thing about it. She turned herself down about half a volume a year, and every year the new setting felt normal, and by about the eighth year she had stopped being able to remember the original.

She is forty one. People describe her as calm, and as measured, and once, at a leaving do, as reserved.

She heard reserved and went to the parking lot.

If somebody told you at nineteen that you were too much, you know exactly what I mean.

What they could not stop doing

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

Silence is not automatically humility. There is a real quiet that comes from having nothing to prove, and it is good, and this is not that. What has happened to you is that a volume knob got turned by somebody else's hand in a corridor and you have been keeping it there ever since out of obedience.

Now read what two men said when they were formally instructed to stop.

For we cannot but speak the things which we have seen and heard.Acts 4:20

Cannot. Not will not, not choose not. The word is about capacity, and they are saying it to a council with the power to have them beaten, which it shortly does.

It is the most unmanaged sentence in the New Testament and Scripture puts it in the mouths of two men who were, an hour before, standing in front of the authorities being told to be quiet.

You have seen and heard things, and speaking of them is what a person does with them rather than a thing to be managed. That is not my encouragement. It is written in Acts 4:20, 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.

And notice this, because it is the part that answers the corridor directly. Nobody in that chapter suggests that Peter should moderate himself. The council wants it. God does not, and the chapter ends with the whole company praying for more boldness, not less.

So twenty two years of the volume knob has not been humility. You have a voice that was given at full size, and the managing was never asked for. The word settled that long before you were nineteen, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the room while you read this.

The particular cruelty of a slow adjustment

Here is what is worth naming, because it explains why you cannot simply undo it by deciding to.

If he had told you to be a different person you would have refused. You were nineteen and you had spine.

What he did was subtler and probably unintentional: he gave you a lifelong project. Watch that. Not stop it, not fix it, watch it, which is a job with no end and no measure, and you have been doing that job for twenty two years without ever once being able to say it was done.

And a volume knob turned half a step at a time never announces itself. Every setting felt like the correct setting, because you had been at the previous one for a year, and there was no point at which you could have noticed a change.

So you did not lose your voice. You have been spending it, on an instruction, faithfully, at half a volume a year.

And the word reserved landed the way it did because some part of you knows exactly what has been happening.

You have permission to be the size you were given, and the permission does not require the man in the corridor to have been wrong about everything. Acts 4 has men who could not stop speaking; His Spirit is the one who makes a woman able to be fully herself in a room without checking the dial.

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 turned down is that somebody near you punishes you when you are not, 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.