Four Seconds of Quiet

Wanda has been giving the same answer since about 2014 and it has never once been true.

They ask her at every gathering. Somebody always does, usually about halfway through the pie, and always kindly: "Wanda, you coming out to the reunion this year?"

And Wanda says, "We will see how the week goes."

That is the answer. She has given it eleven times, and it means nothing, and it is designed to mean nothing, and everybody accepts it and passes the cream.

The true answer is one sentence long. It is: I cannot do that drive any more.

That is it. Five hours each way, and the last time she did it she had to pull off twice and sit in a rest area for forty minutes with her hands shaking, and she has not told a soul, including her own daughter, who was expecting her.

Now, if you asked Wanda why she does not just say it, she would tell you she does not want a fuss.

And that is true, but it is not the thing. The thing is smaller and stranger and it took her until she was seventy-two to see it.

She is afraid of the quiet.

Because she knows exactly what would happen. She would say it, and the table would go silent, and her brother would look up, and her daughter would put her fork down, and there would be about four seconds where the whole room reorganized itself around a fact it had not had.

Four seconds. She has been paying eleven years to avoid four seconds.

She said it this last October.

She did not plan to. Somebody asked, and instead of the sentence she has said eleven times, she said, "No, honey. I cannot do that drive any more."

And the table went quiet.

She counted it afterward, lying in bed, and she thinks it was about four seconds.

Then her brother said, "Well why in the world did you not say?"

And her daughter said, "Mama, we would have come and got you."

And somebody at the far end said something about their own eyes at night, and then somebody else did, and the whole conversation went off in a direction that had nothing to do with her, and the pie went round again.

Four seconds. That was the whole of it.

Now let me ask you about yours.

You have an answer. You give it at the table, or at the door, or on the phone on a Sunday. It is smooth and it costs you nothing to say and it is not true.

Truth and love are the same instruction

Paul gives a two word phrase in Ephesians that gets quoted at people mostly as a warning, and it is not one. It is a description of how a person grows.

But speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him who is the head, even Christ.Ephesians 4:15

Speaking the truth in love. One instruction, not two things held in tension. Paul is not saying be honest but soften it. He is describing a single act: truth is the content and love is the manner, and a sentence missing either one has failed.

And look at what he attaches it to: we are to grow up. Not become nicer, not become braver. Grow up. He treats the smoothing over as a childhood thing, and he says it in the previous verse, that we should no longer be children tossed about.

So hear this over you, at the table with the pie coming round. You are able to say a true thing kindly, and the eleven years of the smooth answer were not love, they were a child's solution to a grown person's situation. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one who gives a person the words at the moment they need them, which He does more often at kitchen tables than at podiums.

Now let me measure your fear, because it will help you to see the actual size of it.

You are not afraid of the sentence. You are afraid of the pause after it.

And the pause is short. It is genuinely, measurably short, and I want you to hold that, because your imagination has been treating it as an open ended catastrophe with no floor.

Four seconds is what it costs for a table to reorganize itself around a fact. Then somebody says why did you not say, and somebody offers to come and get you, and somebody else admits a thing of their own, and within a minute the conversation has moved on and you are still there and everybody still likes you.

Let me say plainly what this is not, because this message must not be turned into something it is not.

This is not about telling a room what is wrong with it.

You are not being asked to raise anything, correct anybody, or hold anybody to account. This is one small true fact about your own life, said in love, at your own table. The moment it becomes a speech about other people it has left Ephesians 4 entirely.

And here is the safety on it. Whether they take it well is not your responsibility and not the measure of whether you should have said it. Scripture says as far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men, and the words as far as it depends on you are there because part of it does not.

You are not the only thing holding that table together. God is, and He was doing that before you started managing everybody's comfort, and He will still be doing it in the four seconds. That is written, and His Spirit is the one who keeps a person steady in a silence.

There was a man five hundred years ago who was told to take back what he had said and could not do it, and what people forget is that he asked for a day to think about it first, and spent the night in prayer, and came back and said it quietly rather than grandly. Courage in a small room is still courage, and it usually looks like a plain sentence and a short silence.