I Have No Words For It

Ruby has never once been able to explain it and she has stopped trying, and the stopping has been read by two people as her backing down.

It happens like this. She is in a situation, and she knows something about it, and the knowing is as clear to her as the color of a wall. And then somebody says why do you think that, and she opens her mouth and there is nothing in it.

Not nothing to say. Nothing to point at. No fact, no incident, no sentence anybody said, nothing that would survive being repeated in a room.

She has tried, over the years, to build something. She has gone back afterwards and looked for evidence, and she can sometimes assemble a case, and every time she has done that she has felt slightly dishonest, because the case is not why she knows. The case is a thing she made afterwards to be allowed to speak.

She is seventy-four and she has been like this since she was a girl.

And she has arrived at a settlement she is not happy with, which is that she says nothing at all now unless she can also argue it, and since she can almost never argue it, she almost never says anything.

Two people have taken that as her having become less certain with age. She has not become less certain. She has become quieter, which is a different thing, and there is nobody she can explain the difference to.

You may know the empty mouth.

Maybe you have also built a case afterwards and felt odd about it. Maybe you have also gone quiet rather than argue. And maybe somebody has taken your silence for doubt.

What Solomon asked for

There is a famous request in 1 Kings, and what is interesting is the specific thing he asks for, because it is not what people remember.

Give therefore thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may discern between good and bad.1 Kings 3:9

An understanding heart.

Not: give me arguments. Not: give me evidence. Not: give me the ability to demonstrate my conclusions to a court.

A heart that understands. A faculty, located in a person, that perceives a difference. And what he gets, in the next chapter, is a reputation built on judgements that people could not have reached but could recognize once they saw them.

Which means the thing you have is the thing that was asked for, in the form it was asked for, and the fact that it does not come with a case attached is not a defect in your version.

It came without a case in his version too. That is what a heart that understands is.

And what you have is a faculty rather than an argument, and it was asked for in that form. The written word has him request an understanding heart to discern, and never once requests the means to prove it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has been quiet for years.

And you are not required to produce a case in order to be permitted to see. The word locates the discerning in the heart rather than in a demonstration, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than examining your reasoning.

The case you build afterwards

Now let me say the thing about the assembled cases, because the discomfort you feel about them is accurate and worth listening to.

When you go back and build a case, you are doing something honest with a dishonest shape.

The honesty is that you genuinely are trying to find something communicable, and that is a decent instinct: you know that because I know is not usable in a room, and you are trying to give people something they can weigh.

The dishonest shape is that the case is presented as the reason, when it is a translation made afterwards. And you can feel the join, which is why it has never sat right.

There is a better sentence available and almost nobody uses it, because it feels weak. It is: I cannot give you a reason. I have a strong sense and I may be wrong.

That sentence is honest, it is weighable by a reasonable person, and it does not claim more than you have. It also cannot be used as a weapon, which is precisely why it is safe.

And you are permitted to say a thing without being able to prove it, as long as you say which it is. The word says let your yea be yea and your nay be nay, which is about plain accuracy of claim rather than about strength of claim, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the nerve for a modest sentence.

And nothing about you is under review for the years of quiet. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman two people have misread.

What you are not required to do with it

One more, and it is the hard boundary of this category.

Nothing here is telling you to start naming things.

The gift perceives. It does not prosecute. There is a version of this article that ends with a woman of seventy-four being encouraged to start saying what she sees about people, and that version would do harm, because a wordless certainty announced about a person is the most unanswerable accusation there is: nothing can be brought against it, because nothing was brought for it.

You have been quiet for years and quiet is not the failure. What is worth changing is only this: quiet because you cannot argue is different from quiet because it is not yours to say, and the second one is a decision rather than a retreat.

And seeing it clearly does not make you the one who names it out loud. The word says a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards, and the Spirit is the one who makes keeping it in an act rather than an absence.