Still Slow, and It Is Not a Fault

Somebody asks him a real question and he takes a day.

Not a rude day. He says he will think about it, and he means it, and he does, and he comes back the next morning with an answer he has actually built. It has been that way since he was young and it is how he is made.

He is thirty nine.

The world he works in does not run at that pace. Things get decided in a meeting by people who arrive with a view already formed, and by the time he has one the thing has usually moved on. He has watched a decision go the wrong way twice this year, in rooms where he knew and could not say it fast enough.

He asked to be filled two years ago on a beach at six in the morning and it was the most straightforward thing he has ever done.

He is exactly as slow as he was.

What has changed, and he has told nobody, is what he does with that fact at about eleven at night. It has begun arriving as a category rather than a trait. Not I am slow. Something closer to: everybody else has been given something I have not.

The sentence, unsaid: maybe I did not get the part that makes people quick.

You may know that eleven o'clock. A pace you have always had, turning into a verdict.

Slow appears twice as an instruction

There is a short instruction in James that has been read as a rule about manners and is actually a description of a pace.

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

Read the three and count the speeds. Swift once. Slow twice.

The only thing anybody is told to be fast at is listening. Everything that comes out of a person is put into the slow column, deliberately, twice, in a single sentence, as an instruction to a whole congregation.

That is not a concession made to people who cannot keep up. It is what the readers are being asked to become.

You are already doing what that verse instructs, and James 1:19 puts slow twice in a three item list and reserves the only speed for hearing, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a letter about doing rather than hearing only and lands it on a man lying awake at eleven.

Nothing in the verse is about capacity

Consider the shape of the sentence, because it is doing something specific with speed as a category.

James is not describing a limitation. He is not saying some people are slower and that is acceptable. He is issuing an instruction, which means he thinks it is a thing a person can and should aim at, and he thinks the aiming is worth writing to a congregation about.

A man who has to be told to be slow to speak is a man who is not, by nature, slow to speak. The verse exists because most people are quick, and because being quick was already causing damage in those churches, which is a different picture of the whole subject from the one running at eleven at night.

And James is not writing to a leisurely people in a leisurely century. Those letters go to congregations under real pressure, scattered, argued about, with plenty of reasons to answer fast. He writes into that and asks for slowness anyway, which is not the instruction of somebody who thinks speed is a virtue that circumstances occasionally excuse.

You have been treating as a deficiency the thing an apostle asked people to develop, because the written word puts slowness in the imperative and never once in the list of things to overcome, and the Spirit of God is what turns a piece of grammar into two years reread.

And notice what the swift one is. Swift to hear. Not swift to conclude. A man who takes a day is not being slow at hearing; he is spending the day on the hearing, which is the one item in the verse where speed was ever asked for and the one he is genuinely fast at.

You are fast at the thing the verse names as the fast one, and James 1 reserves speed for hearing and hands everything else to the slow column, and the same Spirit who moved a man to write it is the one who fills.

The rooms are not the standard

Now the honest part, because his working life is real and this article is not going to pretend it is not.

The rooms genuinely do run faster than he does, and a decision went the wrong way twice this year, and neither of those facts is imaginary or unimportant.

But a room is not a moral standard and the pace of a meeting is not a measurement of a person. Rooms are optimized for getting through an agenda, which is a legitimate goal and is not the same goal as being right, and everybody who has ever sat in one knows that.

You were never being graded by a room that was optimizing for something else, because James 1:19 sets the standard at slowness in speech rather than at speed in a meeting, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a consolation for a man who has watched two decisions go wrong.