I Have Not Spoken Since October

She used to be the one who spoke first. That is what makes this strange to everybody who knows her.

Now she sits in that room for fifty minutes at a time with a pen in her hand and says nothing at all, and she has been doing it since October, and if you asked her she would tell you she is just listening more this year.

What actually happened in October was very small. Somebody made a remark. Not to her, not about her, just a passing aside about the sort of person who still believes that stuff, delivered with a little shrug, and everyone smiled the way a room smiles at something obvious, and the conversation moved on within four seconds.

She did not blush. She wrote something down. And she has not said one thing in that room since.

She is not frightened of them. She likes most of them. What has settled on her is much quieter than fear: a sense that speaking would now cost more than it is worth, followed lately by something worse, which is that the silence might not be a strategy any more. It might be what she has become. She goes whole weeks now without the thing that used to be right at the front of her.

That is your room. That is your October. And I want to speak to that, because there is a prophet who went exactly this quiet and wrote down what it was like.

Shut up in the bones

Jeremiah has been mocked so consistently that he decides to stop, and he says so, and then he tells you what happened when he tried.

Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.Jeremiah 20:9

Look at where the fire is while he is silent.

Not gone. Not cooling. Shut up in my bones, which is what a fire is doing when nobody outside can see it: still burning, contained, and by his own account hotter for being held in rather than colder.

The silence and the burning are simultaneous in that verse. He is not describing a man who lost it. He is describing a man carrying it with the lid on.

You have a fire that did not go out in October. Not dormant, not extinguished. The written word puts the burning inside the silence rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that live in a woman who has sat through fifty minutes with a pen in her hand.

Now let me say something about the person who made the remark, because a term of this has quietly made them into somebody enormous.

They said one clause in four seconds and have no memory of it. They were not aiming at you. They were repeating the room's furniture, and if you sat down with them over coffee you would probably like them, and God is not standing at the other end of that seminar table from them.

You have nobody to face down in that room. The written word does not make your steadiness depend on somebody else being wrong first. The Holy Spirit is at work in that person as much as He is in you.

And now the thing that is actually frightening you, which is not the remark.

It is the weeks. It is that this has stopped feeling like restraint and started feeling like absence, and you cannot tell from the inside which one it is.

Jeremiah could not tell either. That is why the verse exists. He needed the fire to declare itself, and it did, and it was not because he was doing well.

You are not cold, you are covered. A burning fire shut up in my bones, and the shutting up is exactly what made it feel like nothing. The Holy Spirit has been the fire in this, and He does not go out when a room goes quiet.