I Am The One Who Ends Up Shouting

It is not the evening you dread. It is yourself in it.

That is a hard thing for a man to admit and I suspect you have never said it to anybody. Everybody at that table assumes you are dreading the noise, or the mess, or the two of them who cannot sit near each other.

You are dreading the moment your voice goes up.

Because it does. Not every time. Often enough that you have stopped trusting the estimate, and a man who cannot predict himself starts avoiding the situations where the unpredictable thing shows up.

So the evenings get fewer. Not because they are bad, but because you would rather not meet yourself in one.

And then afterward there is the second part, which is worse than the shouting. The going upstairs. The lying there. The specific quality of a man's own company at half past eleven when he has heard his own voice come out of him.

I am going to be very plain about something before we go on, and I want you to take it and not put it down.

You are not a man with a temper problem. You are a man with a speed problem, and those are different, and only one of them is fixable in the next four seconds.

Slow to speak, slow to wrath

There is a sentence in James that gets read as one instruction and is actually three, and separating them is most of the work.

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

Three things in a row, and each one is about tempo rather than about temperament.

Swift to hear. Slow to speak. Slow to wrath.

Notice that not one of them says do not be angry. The verse is not asking a man to feel something different. It is asking him to move at a different speed.

You are a man who can be slow on purpose, and a voice that went up has never once been the measure of the father underneath it. James 1:19 puts the whole instruction on tempo rather than on temperament, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a man that difference without a word of accusation in it.

And look at the middle one, because it sits between the other two on purpose.

Slow to speak comes after swift to hear and before slow to wrath. It is the hinge. A man who slows the speaking has time to finish hearing, and the wrath, which was going to arrive at the speed of the speaking, arrives late or does not arrive at all.

You have one lever and it is in the middle, and slowing the speaking has never once required a man to change what he feels. The Spirit of God is the one who shows a man exactly where the mechanism is, and it is written in James 1 that the order of those three is not decoration.

Which means the whole thing turns on a gap that is about four seconds long.

You are four seconds away from a different evening, and a pause has never once been a smaller act than an apology afterward. It is written that a man is to be slow to speak, which is a thing done with a mouth and not with a heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one at work inside a silence a man leaves on purpose.

What is happening in the four seconds

Now let me describe the gap, because a man goes through it a thousand times without ever looking at it.

Something happens at the table. Somebody says the thing, or knocks the thing, or does the thing the other one hates.

And there is a moment, very short, where you are still deciding. Then something arrives that feels like certainty, and the voice comes out already at volume, and the whole of that takes less than a second.

You are able to put a gap where there is currently no gap, and one second between an event and a voice has never once been enough room for a man to choose anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who slows a man's mouth down while everything else stays exactly the same, and James 1:19 puts the slowness on the speaking as its own separate instruction.

And here is what nobody tells a man about that gap. It is not for calming down.

You will not be calm in four seconds. Nobody is. The gap is not there to change how you feel, it is there so that what comes out afterward is chosen rather than fired.

That is a much lower bar and it is achievable tonight.

You have permission to still be angry at the end of the pause, and four seconds have never once been required to produce a calm man. The Spirit of God is the one who works in a gap that changed nothing except the timing, and Scripture asks for slowness and never once asks for the absence of the feeling.

And it must be silent. That is the only rule inside the four seconds.

Not a warning. Not a sigh. Not right, that is enough. Any of those is speaking, and the verse asks for slow to speak, and a sigh is a whole sentence at that table.

You are able to say nothing for four seconds in a room that expects a response, and a silence has never once been a weakness in the man holding it. It is written that a man is to be swift to hear and slow to speak in that order, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in an ordinary kitchen while a father counts.

What the gap does to the room

Now the part nobody at that table has seen, because it has never had a chance to happen.

A four second silence at a table changes the room, not just you.

Everybody there is braced for the voice. They know the timing as well as you do. When the voice does not arrive on schedule, the whole table has four seconds of not knowing what happens next, and in those four seconds people quite often sort it out themselves.

You are able to leave a space that somebody else fills, and a father who did not speak first has never once lost authority in his own room. The Spirit of God is the one who does something in a household when a man declines to fill a silence, and James 1:19 puts the swiftness on the hearing and the slowness everywhere else.

And there is the thing that will matter most to you at half past eleven.

Even when the voice does come out afterward, it comes out chosen. It is quieter, and it is about the actual thing rather than about everything, and it ends.

That is a completely different object from the thing you have been dreading, and it does not produce the lying there afterward.

You have a way to end the half past eleven, and one chosen sentence has never once cost a man the night that an unchosen one does. It is written in James 1 that the slowness is the instruction, and the Spirit of God is the one who meets a man in a gap rather than in an apology.

Once tonight. That is all that is being asked. One four second gap, in one moment, in twenty minutes in one room.

You are able to do this once, and one gap has never once needed to be a permanent character change to count as obedience. The Spirit of God is the one at work in a single silence, and Scripture asks a man to be slow rather than to be different.