The Hour Before I Speak

Denise has been taught a great deal about the gift and nothing at all about the hour.

She could give you the teaching. She has sat through it three or four times over the years, in different places, and it is broadly the same everywhere: what the gift is, that it is real, that it is not suspicion, one or two warnings, and an encouragement to be open to it.

And then she goes home, and about a fortnight later something rises in her in a room, and she is standing there with it, and every bit of the teaching turns out to have been about the wrong part.

Because the difficulty has never been receiving it. That happens by itself and always has.

The difficulty is the hour afterwards.

She is in the car, or at the sink, or lying there at half past eleven, holding something with no shape, and there is a decision to be made that nobody has ever described to her: whether this is hers to say, and if so to whom, and if not what on earth she is supposed to do with it instead.

She is fifty-two and she has been improvising that hour for about twenty years.

And what she has improvised, mostly, is a kind of stalling. She does not say it. She does not put it down either. She carries it about for a few weeks getting slightly heavier, and then it fades, and she never finds out anything, and the next one arrives.

Twenty years of that.

You may know the hour.

Maybe you have also been taught the gift and never the gap. Maybe you have also been improvising, and calling the improvisation waiting, and noticing that waiting and stalling look identical from inside.

The interval is in the instruction

There is a sentence in James that is short and is almost always read as a rule about temper, and it is more useful than that.

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.James 1:19

Look at the middle term and notice that it has a speed rather than a prohibition.

Not do not speak. Slow to speak. Which means speaking is expected and the instruction is about the rate at which a person gets there, and a rate implies an interval, and the interval is the thing nobody teaches.

And notice the first term is not silence either. Swift to hear. Fast in one direction, slow in the other, and the whole sentence assumes a person who is receiving a great deal and releasing very little of it.

That is a description of your twenty years, and it is written approvingly.

And the hour you have been improvising is described in Scripture as the instruction itself. The written word puts a speed on the speaking rather than a prohibition, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who thought she had been stalling for two decades.

And you are not required to be quick. The word makes swiftness a property of the hearing and slowness a property of the speaking, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than putting a clock on the gap.

Three questions for the hour

Here is the practical part, and it is what nobody ever gave you. Three questions, in order. They take about four minutes and they end the hour.

One. Is this for me to pray about, or for me to say? Almost everything is the first. Not as a cop-out; as a matter of proportion. Most of what a person perceives about the people around them is given so that somebody who loves them prays with more accuracy, and if the answer is prayer then the hour is over and there is nothing to carry.

Two. If it is to be said, what could the person actually answer? If the honest answer is nothing, it is not sayable, and it is not sayable to anybody, in any setting, ever. A thing that cannot be answered is not a communication, it is a weight put on somebody, and this is the single most important test in the whole category.

Three. If it is sayable, to whom, and where, and when? One person, in private, later. Never a room. And if the only version you can imagine is one where other people are present, that is information about what the saying is actually for.

That is it. Three questions. And notice what they do: they end the hour either way. Prayer, or silence with peace, or one quiet conversation. What they never produce is a woman carrying something round for a fortnight until it fades.

And you are able to end the hour rather than carry it until it fades. The word makes slow a rate rather than a state, and a rate has a destination, and the Spirit is the one who supplies the ending that twenty years of improvising has not.

And nothing about you is under review for the twenty years. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who was taught the gift and left to invent the rest.

What stalling has cost

One more thing, gently.

Stalling is not free. Every time something is carried until it fades, it leaves a residue, and twenty years of residue is why the arrival of a new one now brings a small tiredness with it rather than anything else.

You have not been failing. You have been doing the only thing available to a person who was handed a faculty and no procedure. But the procedure is available and it is four minutes long, and the next one that arrives can be finished rather than endured.

And what you carry can be finished. The word says be careful for nothing, but in every thing by prayer let your requests be made known unto God, and the Spirit is the one who receives a thing so that a woman does not have to hold it until it evaporates.