Six Years Of Not Saying It

He knew the answer to the thing they were discussing on Tuesday.

Not an opinion about it. The answer, with where it comes from, and why the obvious alternative has been tried twice and does not work.

He sat there for fifty minutes while the room went round it, and then it got parked until the next meeting, and everybody put their coats on.

He said nothing.

He has said nothing for about six years, and the reason is not what anybody would guess, and he has never told a living soul.

It is not that he thinks they would dismiss him. They would not. Several of them would be delighted.

It is that if he says what he knows, he is also saying something about what he is. There is no way to hand over a thing like that without the handing over carrying a second message, which is: I am the sort of person who knows this.

And he cannot stand to be that man in a room. He has watched that man in rooms. He knows exactly what that man sounds like and he has spent his whole life not being him.

So the room decides without it, and he drives home.

Here is the part he would want on the record, because it matters to him.

He is not proud of the silence. This is not modesty and he knows it is not modesty. It is a horror of a particular kind of voice, and it has grown large enough that he would genuinely rather be useless than sound like that.

If what you know has become the reason you cannot say it, pull up a chair. There is coffee and nobody here is going to ask what you know.

Where the safety actually sits

There is a proverb about counsel that says something specific about where the value of it lies, and it is not where most people assume.

Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.Proverbs 11:14

In the multitude of counselors.

Not in the eminence of one. Not in the qualifications of the best informed person present. The safety is located in there being enough voices in the room, which means a room short one voice is a room with less safety in it, regardless of how distinguished the voices that remain are.

That reframes what you have been withholding. It is not a contribution from a person. It is one of the voices that makes a room safe, and the room has been running six years short.

You are one of the counselors that a room's safety is made of, and the safety was never located in anybody's standing. Proverbs 11:14 puts the safety in the multitude rather than in the eminence, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Spirit of counsel in Isaiah 11:2, which means what you have been holding back is not a claim about a man, it is a piece of the safety of a room.

Counsel is handed over, not asserted

Now the mechanism, because there is a real distinction here and it will do the work.

You have been treating knowledge as a statement about the knower: say the thing, and the thing says something about you. But counsel does not work like that, and the proverb shows why. A counselor is somebody who puts a thing on the table and then stops. The table has the thing. The room does what it does with it. Nobody is required to think anything about the person who put it there, and in a functioning room nobody does, because they are all looking at the thing.

You are able to put something on a table without standing beside it. Proverbs 27:9 says ointment and perfume rejoice the heart, so doth the sweetness of a man's friend by hearty counsel, and it makes the counsel a gift between friends rather than a display between rivals, and it is the same Spirit who is named the Spirit of counsel, which means the transaction you have been dreading is not the transaction that actually happens.

What six years has cost, said once

Here is the honest part, and then we move.

Six years of a room deciding without one of the voices that would have made it safer.

That is a real cost and it is not going to be minimized. But it is also not going to be turned into a whip, because a whip would produce exactly the kind of speaking you have spent your life avoiding.

You were not withholding out of pride, and no verse anywhere charges a man for a silence kept out of horror of self display. Psalm 103:14 says he knoweth our frame, he remembereth that we are dust, and it is written as the reason for God's tenderness rather than as an allowance being made, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means the six years are being handled gently and are not being counted against you.