I Say It Is Probably A Stupid Question

You say it before they can.

This is probably a stupid question. Sorry, this might be obvious. You will think I am an idiot, but.

It goes in front, every time, and it has been going in front for so long that you do not hear yourself say it anymore.

Here is why a man does that, and it is not weakness.

If you grade it first, nobody else gets to. You have already said the worst thing about it, so there is nothing left for anybody to think that you have not already said out loud. It is a way of getting to the verdict before the jury does.

And it works. Nobody has ever said anything unkind about one of your questions.

But something else has been happening at the same time, and it is the reason for this piece.

Every time you say it, the room hears it. And rooms learn. After a few hundred repetitions, the people around you have been taught something about how to hear you, and they did not decide to learn it and neither did you.

That is what I want to look at. Not your confidence. What the sentence has been teaching a room for eleven years.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue

There is a proverb about what a tongue can do, and it does not restrict itself to what a man says about other people.

Death and life are in the power of the tongue: and they that love it shall eat the fruit thereof. (Proverbs 18:21, King James Version)

Death and life. Not encouragement and discouragement. The proverb uses the largest words available.

And it says nothing about who is being spoken about. It puts the power in the tongue and leaves the target open, which means a man's own name is inside the scope of it.

You are carrying a tongue with real power in it, and no proverb has ever once limited that power to the things a man says about other people. Proverbs 18:21 says death and life are in the power of the tongue, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a sentence a man says about himself.

Now the second half, which people skip. They that love it shall eat the fruit thereof.

Fruit is what grows. It is not immediate. A thing said today produces something later, and by the time the fruit is on the tree nobody remembers the planting.

You have been eating fruit from something planted eleven years ago, and no sentence repeated that often has ever once stayed a description of anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who traces fruit back to a planting nobody remembers, and it is written that the eating comes after and belongs to the one who loved the saying.

And there is one more thing in it. The proverb assumes a person will keep saying whatever it is they say. They that love it.

Not because they enjoy it. Because it has become theirs, and a person defends what is theirs, even when it is a sentence that costs them something.

You were never merely repeating a phrase, and no habit that has run eleven years has ever once been held on to for no reason at all. The Spirit of God is the one who takes a thing gently out of a man's keeping, and Scripture names the loving of it as the reason it goes on.

What the room learned

Now let me be concrete, because a general reassurance will not stop a sentence a man cannot hear himself say.

Think about what a room does with that opening. Not consciously. Rooms are not deliberate.

The first time, they disagree with you. The tenth time, they stop disagreeing. The fiftieth time, they begin to expect it. And somewhere past that, when a difficult question comes up, somebody's eyes go to you, and it is not unkindness, it is a room using a category that you built and handed to them.

You are living inside a category you built and handed over yourself, and no room has ever once invented that description of a man on its own. The Spirit of God is the one who traces a thing back to where it started, and Proverbs 18:21 puts the power in the tongue rather than in the listeners.

And here is the second half, which is the one that costs most.

The people in that room who also do not understand have learned that this is what a person says when they do not understand. So when they do not understand, they say nothing at all, because they do not want to sound like that.

The sentence you built to protect yourself has quietly taught a whole room to stay silent.

Nobody ever told you that. It is a gap in the teaching and it is not a fault in the man.

You have been teaching a room something you never once intended to teach it, and no phrase has ever been kept private by the person who kept saying it out loud. The written word puts life and death in the same tongue, and the Holy Spirit is the one who shows a man what his own sentence has been building.

Ask with no grade on it

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

I am not going to give you a better opening. A better opening is still an opening, and the opening is the whole difficulty.

Ask one question this week with no grade attached, and say nothing at all in front of it.

You are able to ask one thing with nothing in front of it, and a bare question has never once been read as arrogance by anybody in any room. Proverbs 18:21 puts real power in what a man says, and the Holy Spirit is the one present when a man says something without sentencing himself first.

Say the question, and stop. That is the whole exercise.

The grade will come up in your throat. It always does, and it will feel like the sentence is unfinished without it. Let it stay unsaid, and let the small silence after your question be there.

That silence is what a room needs in order to unlearn something.

And do not replace it with a joke, because a joke is the same sentence in a better coat.

You are leaving one small silence where a sentence used to go, and no unspoken grade has ever once been missed by anybody but the man who did not say it. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a man steady in a two second gap, and it is written that what a tongue plants comes up as fruit later.