I Wanted To Be The Quiet One

Saturday afternoon setup, and the hall is loud, and about forty percent of the loud is her.

Tables going out. Somebody up a stepladder with bunting who should not be up a stepladder. A woman by the urn laughing so hard at something that she has had to sit down on a stacking chair, and the thing she is laughing at came out of the mouth of the woman carrying the trestle table.

That is her. That has always been her.

She was the loud one at six. She was the loud one at fourteen, which was harder. She has been the one who fills a silence for so long that she does it before she notices she is doing it, and she has spent a great deal of her life on the drive home reviewing what she said.

And here is the thing she has wanted since she was nineteen, and has never said out loud in thirty years.

She wanted to be the other kind.

There is a woman in that church who is about sixty, who says maybe nine things in an evening, and when she says one of them the room goes quiet and turns. She has that. She has always had it. She does not work at it.

And the loud one has watched her for eleven years the way you watch a language you will never speak.

She is not miserable. She likes her own company at a party. She knows the volume has been a gift to about a hundred people, because a room with nobody in it who will start something is a room where nothing happens.

But there is a specific ache at about four in the afternoon at the end of a setup, when everybody is tired and she is still going because she cannot not, and she thinks: I would have given anything to be still.

What is not on this page

Straight out, because you can hear a person coming round to a point from three rooms away.

This is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is no compensating thing at the bottom, no list, no paragraph explaining what God gave you in exchange and expecting you to be satisfied. That would be a page telling you what you are, and this site does not do it.

And it is not going to tell you the stillness is coming. Nobody knows that and I am not going to make a promise on God's behalf that He has not made.

And it is not going to tell you the loud is secretly better. That is the trick where a person is handed a compliment instead of an answer, and you would see through it before the end of the paragraph.

You are not being handled here, and there is no trade being set up. That is not caution on my part. Scripture is what handles this, in one sentence to a prophet who was looking at the wrong thing, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman reconciled to a substitute before He would speak to her.

God tells Samuel he is looking at the wrong thing

Here is the sentence, and it is said to a man who is about to make an entirely reasonable mistake.

Samuel is looking at a line of brothers and doing what any sensible person would do, which is reading the outside for information about the inside.

But the LORD said unto Samuel, Look not on his countenance, or on the height of his stature, because I have refused him: for the LORD seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the LORD looketh on the heart.1 Samuel 16:7

Now read it as it applies to you rather than as it applies to somebody being chosen.

Man looketh on the outward appearance. Which is not just about height. It is about everything a room can perceive about a person: her volume, her manner, her presence, the way she takes up space, whether she is the still kind or the other kind.

The Lord looketh on the heart.

Which means the assessment you have been running on yourself for thirty years, in the car, on the drive home, reviewing what you said, has been an assessment conducted entirely in the category He does not use.

You are being looked at in a place a room cannot see, and thirty years of reviewing your volume was an audit He was never conducting. I am not stretching that. 1 Samuel 16:7 names the two categories and puts God firmly in the second one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman at the end of a setup at four in the afternoon.

The wanting is not a defect

Now something worth saying, because you have been treating it as a fault for a long time.

Wanting a different temperament is not self-hatred and it is not ingratitude. It is the ordinary experience of watching somebody do effortlessly a thing that would have made your life easier, and it is very old and it is very human.

Scripture does not correct people out of longings like that. It handles them, and it does it without ever telling anyone to stop feeling.

And notice, please, that the woman of sixty who says nine things has almost certainly wanted something too. Everybody does. The people who look effortless are always paying for something in a currency the watcher never sees.

You have not been failing at contentment for thirty years, you have been carrying an ordinary longing that Scripture never once asks a person to talk herself out of. The word deals with longing in half a dozen lives without correcting it away, and the Spirit who searches all things has been on that drive home with you and has never joined in the review.

Handing over, exactly

So here is the action, and it must be said precisely, because the sloppy version of this does damage.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it. That is not true.

It is not deciding you will never have it. Neither of us knows.

It is not deciding the loud is your gift and being pleased about it. Nobody here is telling you what your gift is.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, in your own voice, and putting it into His hands rather than carrying it in the car every week for another thirty years.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture never asks a woman to feel differently before she can hand something over. The word puts the looking in a place a room cannot reach, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to be content first.