I Turned Myself Down Everywhere

Her own daughter said it and it was not a complaint and that is what made it land.

They were in the kitchen and something funny happened, and her daughter laughed properly, the way people in that family laugh, and then said: you used to be the loud one.

Used to be.

She is forty six. She came into the room she is in now at thirty one, and it is a quiet room. Not cold. Not unfriendly. Genuinely warm and genuinely quiet, in the way some rooms are, where a raised voice is not wrong exactly but everybody notices it.

And she came in at her own volume, which is considerable, and she noticed within about two months that she was the weather in every conversation.

So she turned it down. Sensibly. Out of love, actually, because she did not want people to be managing her, and she is quite capable of taking up a whole room without meaning to.

That was fifteen years ago and she did it well and nobody in that room would describe her as loud.

And the volume did not come back up when she left the building.

That is what her daughter noticed. Not in that room. In this kitchen. In her own house, with her own family, where nobody has ever asked her to be anything.

She said afterward, to the sink: I turned down a knob and I cannot find it now.

You know that knob.

Maybe yours is volume and maybe it is something adjacent. Intensity. Speed. How much you say. How much of what you feel arrives on your face. Maybe somebody in your family has said used to be about something and you have not stopped hearing it.

Nobody did this to you. The room did not ask. You made a considerate adjustment for a real reason and you made it well, and nobody warned you that the adjustment does not stay in the building.

Diversities of operations

Here is a sentence in the middle of the passage about gifts, and the noun in it is doing something people miss.

And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.1 Corinthians 12:6

Diversities of operations.

Operation is a word about how a thing runs. Not what it is for, and not who is doing it. How it operates. Loudly, quietly, fast, slow, all at once, over years.

And he says the diversities are in the operations, and then he says the same God works all of them. Not: God works one way and permits variations. The differences in how it runs are described as part of the arrangement rather than as noise around it.

You are a diversity of operations worked by the same God, and range was never a fault to be corrected. That is what 1 Corinthians 12:6 puts in one sentence, difference in operation and unity in source (1 Corinthians 12:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who is named three verses later as dividing to every man severally as He will, which means the volume you came in with was issued rather than merely permitted.

What you did was right and it had a side effect

Now let me be careful, because a woman who has spent fifteen years being considerate should not be told she was wrong to be.

You were not wrong. A person who can fill a room without meaning to has a real responsibility to notice that, and most people who are loud never do notice, and the ones who do are almost always the ones who care about other people.

And a quiet room is not a defective room. It is a room. There are things that happen in quiet rooms that cannot happen in loud ones, and you have received some of them.

You have not been suppressed by anybody, and the turning down was love rather than fear. Scripture says let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves (Philippians 2:3), and it is the Holy Spirit who produces that instinct in a person, and He was in it fifteen years ago.

The side effect is the only issue. You adjusted an instrument and the adjustment turned out not to be a setting you could return from, and nobody told you that because nobody knows it until it has happened.

And nothing here tells you to be loud in that room

Let me be plain, because you could take this back into a quiet building and make everybody uncomfortable in the name of authenticity, and that would be a poor use of an article.

Nothing here tells you to go back up to full volume in a room that runs quiet. Reading a room remains a good and loving skill and you have it and you should keep it.

What is being pointed at is your own kitchen, where nobody has ever set a level, and where you have been running at somebody else's setting for fifteen years without anybody asking.

You are not being told to change how you are in any room that is not yours. The word says be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves (Matthew 10:16), and both are asked for together, and it is His Spirit who produces both, which is why nobody has to choose between being considerate and being present.