Quiet Is Not Agreement

Nine meetings, and he has said seventeen words.

He counted once, out of curiosity rather than self pity, and it came to seventeen, and eleven of them were on the first evening when everybody had to say their name and what they did.

He is not shy. That is the thing people get wrong about him and the thing he has never bothered to correct.

He thinks slowly, on purpose, because he was taught to by people who did not think slow was a failure, and what happens in that room is that a subject arrives and eleven people are on it inside four seconds, and by the time he has actually turned it over and found the thing he thinks, the room has moved on twice and the moment has closed.

So he says nothing, and he listens, and he goes home and thinks about it properly in the car and in the shed and sometimes at three in the morning.

Here is what has begun to bother him.

Two different people have thanked him. Both of them separately, both warmly, both on the way to the car park, and both of them said some version of: I am glad you were behind me on that.

He was not behind either of them. They hold opposite positions. And he had a third view, which he still thinks is better than both, and which has never left the shed.

His silence has been read twice, in two directions, by two people, and both readings are wrong, and he has corrected neither.

And underneath that is the older thing, which he has carried since he was about fourteen. He is not sure any more whether the quiet is his nature, which he does not want to apologize for, or whether at some point it turned into a place to hide.

Swift to hear, and slow, and both of those are instructions

Sit down out here where it is quiet, because there is a line in James that describes the way you are made and calls it obedience rather than a limitation, and the Holy Spirit put it there for men who think in sheds.

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.James 1:19

Swift to hear. Slow to speak.

That is not a description of a timid man. It is an instruction, given to a whole church, and the speed is specified in both directions on purpose: fast at one thing, deliberately slow at another.

The room you sit in on a Thursday runs the opposite way, and it does not know it is doing anything unusual, because a room full of quick speech feels like a room that is working.

Hear this in the shed. You are not a defective member of that group, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts slow speech in the instruction column, and the Holy Spirit has been doing something in you between Thursday and Sunday that eleven people who spoke in four seconds are not doing at all.

Now let me name the actual problem, because it is real and it is not your temperament.

The problem is not that you are quiet, because nothing written in Scripture calls quiet a problem and the Holy Spirit made you this way on purpose. The problem is that quiet has no content, so the room fills it in.

An empty space is never left empty by other people. It gets read, and it gets read in whichever direction suits the reader, which is why two men who disagree with each other both walked to their cars believing you were with them. That is not what the written word means by slow, and it is not what the Holy Spirit gave you a shed for.

That is not their fault and it is not yours. It is what silence does, and it will keep doing it every Thursday for as long as there is nothing in it.

Hear this too, and let it stand. You are not required to become fast, and Scripture is what says so. What is written asks you to be slow to speak and never once asks you to be silent, and the Spirit of God gave you the third view in the shed on a Tuesday and did not do it so that it could stay in the shed.

And now the smallest possible change, because it is not a personality transplant and I would not ask you for one.

Say one sentence, early, before you have finished thinking. The written word asks for slow speech and never for no speech, and the Holy Spirit can carry twelve words a long way.

Not your conclusion. You will not have it by then and you are not going to have it by then, ever, and waiting for it is what has produced seventeen words in nine meetings. The written word never asked for a conclusion at minute four and the Holy Spirit is not withholding one.

Say the thing you actually have at minute four, which is usually a question, or a doubt, or the observation that the room has not defined what it is arguing about. Twelve words. Then go quiet again and think properly, the way you do.

That is enough content to stop the space being read. Nobody will thank you for agreeing with them after you have said one honest sentence in the middle of it, and the Holy Spirit does more with one written truth said plainly than with a room full of speed.