I Wanted To Be Brave Out Loud

Everybody has gone and the chairs are still in the rough circle they migrate into over ninety minutes, and she is doing the cups because she is always doing the cups.

It was a hard meeting. Not a fight. Worse than a fight in some ways: a room where a thing was said that should have been answered and nobody answered it, and the conversation moved on, and somebody who was in that room went home carrying something they should not have to carry.

She knew it while it was happening. She knew it at the exact moment, and she knew what should have been said, and she had it in words, and the words were good.

And she said nothing.

Then afterward, in the corridor, she found that person, and she walked with them to the parking lot, and she said the thing quietly, one to one, and it landed, and it helped.

That is what she does. That is what she has done for twenty years.

And on the drive home she will do the thing she does every time, which is call it cowardice.

Because there is a woman on that same committee who would have said it out loud in the room. She has watched her do it four or five times over the years and every time it changed the temperature of the whole meeting in about nine seconds.

She has wanted to be that since she was twenty. She has prayed about it in the specific desperate way a person prays about a thing they believe is a defect in them, and it has not come, and she is forty-two, and she has begun to suspect it is not coming.

What is not here

Let me say it before anything else, because you will read carefully and you deserve to know the shape.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is no compensating thing arriving at the bottom, no list, no paragraph that reveals your real gift and expects you to feel better about the corridor. That would be a page telling you what you are, and this site does not do that.

And it is not going to tell you that the corridor is secretly braver than the room. That is a compliment offered instead of an answer, and you would see it coming.

And it is not going to promise you the boldness is on its way. Nobody knows that, and twenty-two years of praying for it deserves better than a guess dressed as a word.

You are not being managed through a disappointment, and there is no trade being set up here. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this, in a conversation with a man who raised exactly your objection, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman reconciled to a substitute before He would speak to her.

Jeremiah says he is not that sort of person

Here is the exchange. It happens in about two verses and most people remember only the first half.

God tells Jeremiah what he is for. And Jeremiah says the thing anybody would say.

Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the LORD said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak.Jeremiah 1:6-7

Now read what God does not do with the objection.

He does not argue with the facts. He does not tell Jeremiah he is actually older than he thinks or bolder than he thinks or that he has hidden reserves. He does not do the pep talk. He never once addresses the accuracy of the self-description.

He says say not. Which is to say: that is not the category we are working in.

Jeremiah has offered a description of what sort of person he is, and God declines to treat that as the relevant question.

You have been offering a description of your own temperament as though it were the thing under assessment, and Scripture shows God simply declining to work in that category. I am not stretching that. Jeremiah 1:7 refuses the self-description without disputing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a woman doing cups in an empty room.

Gentleness is not the same as cowardice

Now let me say the plain thing, because you have been calling it by the wrong name for twenty years and the wrong name has been doing damage.

Cowardice is not saying the thing anywhere. You said it. Nine minutes later, in a corridor, to the person who needed it, and it landed and it helped.

What you did was choose a different room to say it in. That is a decision about placement, and you have made it several hundred times, and you may well have made it wrongly on some occasions, which is the ordinary condition of a person making judgment calls.

But cowardice is not a description of what happened tonight, because the thing got said.

You are not a coward and tonight is not evidence that you are, because the sentence you had in the meeting was spoken out loud within the hour to the one person it was for. The word never once defines courage as volume in a room, and the Spirit who searches all things was in that corridor with you and is not standing on the drive home agreeing with the verdict.

Handing it over, precisely

So here is the action, and it must be exact, because the careless version of this does harm.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it.

It is not deciding it will never come. God said say not to Jeremiah and then sent him to speak to kings, so I am certainly not going to tell you what He does or does not do with a temperament.

It is not deciding that gentleness is your gift and being pleased. Nobody here is telling you what your gift is.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, and putting it into His hands rather than praying about it as a defect for another twenty-two years.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture never asks a person to revise her self-assessment before she can hand something over. The word simply moves the question out of the category, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to feel bolder first.