When I Am Worried This House Goes Quiet

Your wife can tell from the yard. Not from your face and not from anything you say. From the way you shut the truck door.

You are not a shouter. You have never been a shouter, not once in twenty-six years, and if anybody asked your children they would tell you that with some pride.

What you are is quiet, and there are two kinds of it in this house and everybody in here can tell them apart at forty yards.

There is ordinary quiet, which is most of your life, and which is fine, and which your daughter has learned to talk straight through.

And then there is the other one. It comes when something is genuinely on you: the rain not coming, the thing with the bank, a decision you have been turning over for a fortnight and have not mentioned. And it does not stay in you. It goes out through the whole house like cold air under a door.

Nobody talks at supper. Or they do, and they check your face first, and then they talk carefully.

You noticed it properly in the spring, when your son, who is nineteen and is not sentimental about anything, said to his mother in the kitchen, not knowing you were on the porch, is Dad all right, or is it just weather.

Or is it just weather. Nineteen years old and he has a system for reading you.

A word fitly spoken

Sit on that step a while. I am not going to tell you to open up more, because that is advice for a different man and it has never once been any use to you.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit is not in the business of shaming a quiet man for being quiet: your silence is not a fault. A man who does not put his worry onto his family is not a man doing damage; he is a man carrying something. There is nothing in this article that requires you to become talkative, and I am not going to hand you an instruction to share your feelings at supper, which would be a foreign language to you and everybody at that table would hear it.

And nobody else is in scope here. Not your wife, not your son, not one word about anything anybody else brings into that kitchen. Your own mouth is the only thing in this article.

Now come and look at a proverb about a small thing said at the right moment.

A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.Proverbs 25:11

That is a picture of something small, deliberate and worth a great deal. Not a speech. Not an explanation. A word. One, placed well.

And the value is not in the quantity. Apples of gold set in silver is a small ornamental object; the whole image is about something modest and finely made and put in the right setting.

Which is exactly the point for a man like you, and it is what is written and not my opinion of you. You have been reading your quiet as a deficiency of words, and quietly concluding that men who talk have something you have not got. That is not what the proverb values. It values one word, placed right, and a man who says very little is in a better position to place one than a man who says everything.

One sentence out of your mouth in that kitchen doorway carries more in that house than a paragraph would in most. That is not me flattering a quiet man on a porch step. That is what the proverb weighs and how it weighs it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a step at dusk.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a room. When you speak over that kitchen, you are not explaining yourself and you are not performing an ease you do not have. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not need you to have stopped worrying about the rain.

A blessing said in that doorway is not you telling them everything is fine. Scripture says peace be to this house, which Christ told His people to say walking into houses (Luke 10:5), and it is a word spoken over a room rather than a report on the man's circumstances, and the Spirit is the one who carries it.

What they are actually reading

Now let me name it accurately, because you have been diagnosing it as your mood and it is not that. What is written names it differently, and the Spirit has no complaint about a quiet man.

They are not reading your worry. They are reading an absence of information, and a house with an absence of information in it fills the gap with whatever it has, which is usually the worst available option, and your nineteen year old has built a two-category system to cope with the uncertainty.

Is Dad all right, or is it just weather. That is a boy managing risk with limited data.

So the thing that fills the house is not your silence. It is what your silence leaves for other people to work out, and that is not a moral failing on your part, it is simply what happens in an information vacuum in a house where everybody loves each other.

And what is written never once asked a man to explain his finances at supper, and the Spirit is not standing on that porch waiting for you to become somebody else.

God has never once made a man's temperament the condition of His peace resting on a room. It is written that not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:6), which rules out effort and capacity as the mechanism, in writing, and the same Spirit who breathed that is on this porch, which is why it lands as a fact about how it works and not as advice about how to be.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you the house will feel different if you say this. I have no authority to promise you an atmosphere in exchange for a sentence, and there will be evenings when you say it in that doorway and the whole thing is still quiet by seven. What God does in that kitchen is His, entirely.

What I can put in your hands is this: one thing can be said into that house before the quiet gets there, and it is not an explanation and it costs you nothing you have not got. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and nine words out of a man who says almost nothing land in a room like a stone in a pond.