I Apologize To The Person On The Phone

You have a speech, and you have been giving it for years.

It goes something like this. Hello, sorry, I am not very good with these things, I am probably going to explain this badly, my son usually helps me with this but he is away, sorry, right, so what has happened is.

Forty seconds. Sometimes a minute. And the person on the other end is listening politely to every word of it because that is their job.

Then you ask the question, and the question takes nine seconds, and they answer it in about twenty.

So you have noticed something recently, and it has been bothering you. The apology is now three times longer than the thing you rang about.

And there is something else, which took you longer to see. That speech does not make the call go better. You have run the experiment hundreds of times without meaning to, and the calls where you gave the whole speech went exactly like the calls where you did not.

What the speech does is set the room before the question arrives. It tells a stranger, in advance, what to think of the man they are about to help.

That is the part worth looking at today.

Ask, and it shall be given you

There is an instruction about asking that is often quoted and rarely read as an instruction.

And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. (Luke 11:9, King James Version)

Ask. Seek. Knock. Three verbs, all of them plain, none of them qualified.

There is nothing in the sentence about asking well. Nothing about asking briefly. Nothing about establishing your credentials before you begin.

You are given a one word instruction with no conditions attached to it, and heaven has never once required a preamble in front of a request. Luke 11:9 says ask, and it shall be given you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that ordinary for a man who has been explaining himself for forty seconds first.

Look at what comes just before it in that chapter, because the context matters. Jesus has been telling a story about a man knocking on a friend's door in the middle of the night for bread, and the man in the story does not apologize for the hour.

He asks, plainly, at an unreasonable time, and the story ends with him getting what he came for.

You have a story in Scripture where somebody asks at a bad hour without one word of apology, and no request has ever once been improved by being wrapped in one. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes the wrapping off, and it is written that the asking and the receiving stand next to each other with nothing in between.

And there is one more thing, which is that the instruction is given as a command rather than a permission. It is not you may ask. It is ask.

Something commanded is not something a person has to earn the right to do.

You were commanded to do the thing you have been apologizing for doing, and no man has ever once needed to qualify for an instruction he was given. The Spirit of God is the one who turns a permission a person is not sure about into an instruction they were handed, and Scripture puts all three verbs in the imperative.

What the speech actually does

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not survive the next call.

Consider what that person on the other end hears. They hear forty seconds establishing that the caller expects to be a problem. Then they hear a nine second question that is usually completely ordinary.

The mismatch is the thing. The speech promises a difficult call, and then an easy one arrives, and the person is left slightly puzzled without knowing why.

You are announcing a difficulty that never turns up, and no ordinary question has ever once needed a warning in front of it. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a man what his own opening actually sounds like, and Luke 11:9 puts the asking first with nothing standing in front of it.

And here is the second half, which is about you rather than about them. Saying I am not very good with these things out loud, several times a month, for years, is a practice.

Nobody ever told you that a sentence repeated that often stops being a description and starts being an instruction to yourself. That is a gap in the teaching, and it is not a gap in you.

You have been rehearsing a line about yourself hundreds of times without ever agreeing to learn it, and a sentence said often enough has never once stayed a neutral description. The written word puts a bare command where a person expects a qualification, and the Holy Spirit is the one who interrupts a practice nobody signed up for.

The question, first

Now the small thing, and it is a subtraction rather than an addition.

I am not going to give you a better speech. A better speech would still be a speech, and the speech is the whole problem.

On the next call, say the question first.

You are able to open with the thing you rang about, and one plain question has never once been an unreasonable way to start a conversation. Luke 11:9 says ask, and it shall be given you, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in the two seconds after hello when a man decides what to say next.

Say hello. Say your name if they need it. Then say the question, in the words you would use to ask a neighbor about a fence.

Nothing before it. No I am probably going to explain this badly. No my son usually does this. No sorry.

And if you feel the speech coming, let the silence sit for one second instead. One second of quiet is not rude, and it is much shorter than forty seconds of apology.

You are giving somebody one job instead of two, and a plain question has never once obliged a stranger to reassure anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a rehearsed line out of a man's mouth, and it is written that the asking and the receiving stand side by side with nothing between them.