I Go Quiet And I Hate It

You are not a quiet man anywhere else.

At work you are the one who says the thing nobody wants to say. Your friends would describe you as good company. There is a version of you that is funny and easy and takes up a normal amount of room.

None of that gets into that house.

You go in, and inside about ten minutes something shuts, and for the next four hours you are a man in a chair answering direct questions in as few words as possible and volunteering absolutely nothing.

And you drive home hating it.

Not hating them. Hating yourself, specifically, for having been a man who sat there. You run the afternoon back and find three or four moments where you could have said something perfectly ordinary and did not, and you cannot account for why, and by the time you get home you have decided something fairly harsh about your own character.

Let me start with the thing I suspect you have never been told about that silence.

It is not a personality trait and it is not weakness. Silence in a specific room is a strategy, and it was almost certainly an effective one at some point. Somewhere in your history, saying things in that room cost something, and a young man worked out that saying nothing cost less. That was correct arithmetic at the time and the habit stayed after the conditions changed.

When I kept silence

There is a line in the psalms about keeping quiet that reports the physical cost of it, which almost nothing else in literature does.

When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my roaring all the day long. (Psalm 32:3, King James Version)

Look at what he says silence did. My bones waxed old. Something aged in him. It is a physical claim, not an emotional one, and it is made plainly and without embarrassment.

And then the extraordinary phrase: through my roaring all the day long. He was silent and roaring at the same time. Outside, nothing. Inside, a noise going on continuously, all day, every day.

That is the most accurate description of your drive home in the whole of Scripture. A man who said nothing and was not remotely quiet.

You have been roaring all day long while saying nothing, and it is written into Psalm 32:3 exactly like that, as silence and roaring together. The Spirit of God is the one who lets a man recognize himself in that verse rather than reading past it, and the written word reports the cost as physical.

And notice the tense. When I kept silence. It is describing a period that ended.

You are able to be in a stretch that ends rather than a condition that is permanent, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a possibility rather than a nice observation. Psalm 32:3 puts the silence in the past tense of a man's account, and Scripture treats the keeping of silence as a thing a person was doing rather than a thing a person is.

What the drive home is actually about

Let me be exact about the worst part, which is not the four hours.

The four hours are survivable. Thirty of them have been survived already. What does the damage is the ninety minutes afterward, in the car, where you conduct a full review and reach a conclusion about yourself.

And the conclusion is always the same and it is always too big. Not: I did not say much today. Something more like: I am the kind of man who cannot be himself in front of his own family.

That is a verdict, delivered by a tired man, on the strength of one afternoon, alone, at night, on a road. It is the worst possible court and it sits every year.

You were never getting a fair hearing in that car, and the written word reports what silence costs without ever handing down a verdict on the man keeping it. Psalm 32:3 describes and does not condemn, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an annual sentencing away from a man who has been passing it on himself.

And here is the second thing, which is more practical. You have been trying to fix it by resolving to be more open, and it has failed every year, because open is not an action. It is a description of an outcome, and a man cannot execute a description.

What a man can execute is a sentence. One or two of them, decided beforehand, small enough to be certain of.

You have never once been given something you could actually do, and Scripture puts a plain physical report where an instruction would have been useless. Psalm 32:3 names what happened rather than telling a man to be different, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands somebody an action instead of an aspiration.

Two sentences, decided now

So here is the assignment, and the smallness is deliberate.

Decide the two sentences you will say in that room, and say them out loud once tonight.

Two. Not a conversation. Not being more forthcoming. Two specific sentences, decided now, that you will say to two specific people at some point in the afternoon.

They should be entirely ordinary. Ask your uncle about the thing he was doing in the spring. Tell somebody the one thing about your own year that you would actually be glad to say out loud. Ask the youngest person there a real question rather than the standard one.

You are able to say two ordinary sentences in four hours, and it has never once required you to be a different man in that house. Psalm 32:3 reports what keeping silence cost rather than demanding an outgoing personality, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man in the two seconds before he opens his mouth.

And notice why two rather than none, and also why two rather than being open.

None means the drive home happens again, because the review will find the same nothing it always finds. Being open is unmeasurable, so the review will always find it failed. Two is a number, and a number can be met, and a man who has met a number has something true to answer the car with.

You are giving the drive home something it cannot argue with, and the written word puts a plain fact where a self accusation would go. Psalm 32:3 states what happened, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man on a road at night who can point to two things he actually said.