I Have Become A Person Who Nods

Her husband said it as an observation, not a criticism, and it went through her like cold water.

They were washing up. He said: you know you did not say anything for the whole evening.

And she said, I did. And he said, you agreed with things. That is not the same.

And she stood there with a plate in her hand and could not produce a single sentence she had said that night that had been hers.

She is forty three. She was, and everybody who knew her at twenty five would tell you this, a person with opinions. Strong ones, well argued, sometimes wrong and always hers. She was the one you invited if you wanted the evening to go somewhere.

She could tell you exactly when it started to go and she has never told anybody.

There was a night, in one room, where she said what she thought and it cost her, not dramatically, just a coolness that lasted about four months. And there was a different night, in the other room, where she said a different thing she thought and it cost her there.

And the thing about having two rooms is that almost every opinion you could hold belongs to one of them. So she learned, without ever deciding, that having a view is a thing that costs money somewhere, and she has been paying nothing for about twelve years.

She nods. She asks good questions, which is a beautiful way to hide. She has become extremely restful to be around.

And on the good days she thinks she has grown in wisdom, and on the bad days she suspects she has simply gone out.

You know that washing up.

Maybe you have noticed you are the one who says, well, there is something in that, about everything. Maybe you cannot remember what you think about something you used to care a great deal about. Maybe you have started to feel like weather rather than a person.

Nobody silenced you. That is what makes it so hard to point at. Two rooms and one soft cost each, and the arithmetic did the rest over about a decade.

Somebody else did this exact thing

Here is a psalm that gets read as being about self control, and it is not. It is about a man who kept quiet for tactical reasons and then found out what it was doing to him.

I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from good; and my sorrow was stirred. My heart was hot within me, while I was musing the fire burned: then spake I with my tongue.Psalm 39:2-3

Look at the sequence, because it is your last twelve years in three clauses.

He kept silent. Deliberately, and for a reason. He says elsewhere in the psalm that it was while the wicked was before him, so this is a man managing a room and there is nothing foolish about it.

And then: even from good. He stopped saying the good things too. That is what happens. You cannot hold back one category of speech, and the silence spreads to everything, and this psalm is the only place I know where anybody says so out loud.

And then, my sorrow was stirred. Not relief. Not peace. The keeping in did not settle him, it stirred him, and he says his heart got hot.

And then, at last, he speaks. And what he says when he finally speaks is not aimed at the room at all. It is addressed to God.

You are described in an ancient psalm, and the sorrow that came with the silence is in the text rather than being a fault in you. That is exactly what the sequence records, silence, then even from good, then sorrow stirred (Psalm 39:2-3), and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that verse in a songbook so that a woman with a plate in her hand would know somebody had been here first.

The nodding was not cowardice

Let me say this before anything else is said, because you will have called yourself things.

You did not go quiet because you are weak. You went quiet because you got accurate information twice and updated on it, which is what an intelligent person does. Both of those costs were real. Nobody imagined them.

You have been behaving sensibly, and there is no cowardice anywhere in this to repent of. Scripture says a prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself (Proverbs 22:3), and it is the Holy Spirit who gives that kind of prudence, and He was not disappointed in a woman who worked out what a sentence cost and stopped saying it.

The trouble is not that you were sensible. It is that a strategy became a personality, quietly, over twelve years, and nobody noticed until a man with a tea towel said something at a sink.

And nothing here is sending you into either room

I want to be extremely clear, because a page like this could get somebody into an argument on Sunday and then leave.

Nothing here tells you to say the thing in either room. Not the thing that cost you four months of coolness, and not the other thing. This page does not know those people, does not know what it would cost now, and has no right to spend your relationships to make a point about your voice.

You are not being asked to speak into any room, and nothing about this requires anybody else to be present. The word says a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver (Proverbs 25:11), and it is the Holy Spirit who gives the fitness and the timing, and that is a real gift and it is not the same as never speaking at all.

Where the psalm ends up is the point. He does not go back and address the room. He turns and speaks to God, and that is where his voice comes back on.