He Says It Perfectly In The Car

At this table he can say anything.

His family will tell you. He is funny, he is clear, he can hold a courtyard of thirty people and bring the whole thing round to a point and land it, and he has been doing that since he was about nineteen.

He gets into that room and the words go somewhere else.

Not entirely. He can speak. It is not a stammer and it is not fear exactly. It is that everything arrives slowly and in the wrong order, and what comes out is smaller and flatter than what he meant, and he can hear it being smaller while it is happening.

And then he gets in the car.

And on the way home, out loud, to nobody, he says the whole thing. Perfectly. In order, in the right words, with the point where the point goes.

Forty minutes too late, every single time.

He has been doing that for years, and about four years ago he drew a conclusion from it, and the conclusion is the reason this article exists.

He decided he is not a man who contributes.

It is a tidy conclusion. It explains everything and it costs nothing to hold and nobody has ever argued with it, because nobody knows he holds it.

And it is built entirely on what happens to him in one room.

Not on his life. Not on the thirty people at this table who would follow him anywhere. On one room, and a particular chair in it, and the way words behave there.

If the words come easily everywhere except where it counts, sit down and have a coffee. Nobody at this table is in a hurry.

The two questions God asked a slow speaker

There is an exchange where a man tells God plainly that he cannot speak well, and God does not contradict him.

And Moses said unto the Lord, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.Exodus 4:10-12

Notice what does not happen. God never says Moses is wrong about himself. He does not tell him he is secretly eloquent, or that the slowness is imagined, or that he simply needs more confidence.

He asks who made the mouth.

And then He does not fix it. He says: go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say. The slow mouth goes to Egypt still slow, and God goes with it.

You are being sent with the mouth you actually have rather than the one that works in the car. Exodus 4:11 has God claiming responsibility for how a man's speech is made and then promising to be with it as it is, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the promise attached to the unchanged mouth rather than to a repaired one, which means slow and small in that room is the equipment being sent, not a disqualification from being sent.

The conclusion drawn four years ago

Now the tidy conclusion, because it is the thing actually running your life and it has never been examined.

The conclusion is: I am not a man who contributes.

Look at the evidence base. One room. One kind of room, in fact: fast, verbal, full of people whose sentences arrive finished. In that specific environment your words come slowly, and a conclusion about a whole man has been drawn from a single set of conditions.

There is a courtyard behind you with thirty people in it who would tell you that conclusion is nonsense, and none of them have been consulted, because the conclusion was reached in a car.

You have generalized from one room to your whole self, and no verse anywhere measures a person by their worst environment. 1 Samuel 16:7 says man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is written of God deliberately disregarding the impressive surface, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things, which means what happens to your sentences in one chair has never been the measure of what is in you.

What slow actually is

Here is a thing worth turning round, because it changes the room considerably.

Slow is not empty. Those are different.

A man whose words arrive slowly and in the wrong order is a man doing more processing than the fast speakers, not less. The reason it comes out flat is that you are still assembling it while the room has moved on, and the reason you can say it perfectly forty minutes later is that the assembly finished.

You are carrying finished thought that simply arrives at a different speed, and Scripture never once rates a speaker by pace. Proverbs 15:28 says the heart of the righteous studieth to answer, but the mouth of the wicked poureth out evil things, and it puts the studying on the good side of the comparison and the pouring on the other, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Spirit of counsel in Isaiah, which means the thing that makes you late in that room is the same thing that makes you right in the car.