Still Slow With Words

He has never been any good at talking and he is fifty two.

That is not modesty and it is not a thing he says fishing for a compliment. It is a fact he has lived with since he was a boy, and he could give you the evidence in about a minute if you asked, which nobody does, because they have all seen it.

He is slow. There is a gap between the thing arriving in him and the thing coming out of his mouth, and the gap is long enough that in most conversations somebody else has already said something by the time he gets there. He knows what he thinks. He almost always knows what he thinks. The thinking is not the problem.

At a graveside two years ago he had something to say to a woman he had known for thirty years and he stood there and said nothing at all, and she moved on down the line, and he has thought about it since.

He asked to be filled about eighteen months ago. Properly, on his own, in the truck.

And nothing about his mouth has altered.

He does not talk about that either. He would not know how to raise it. But it sits there, and every time he stands in a room and does not say the thing, some part of him files it, and the file has been getting thicker.

The sentence, unsaid: if He had really come into me, I would be able to say something.

You may know that gap. The thing arriving, and no road out of you for it.

God asks who made the mouth

There is a conversation at a burning bush where a man makes exactly this objection, and the answer he gets is not what anybody would predict.

Moses says he is not eloquent. He says he is slow of speech and of a slow tongue, which is about as close to this man's own description of himself as anything in the book.

And God does not say the objection is untrue.

And the Lord said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the Lord?Exodus 4:11

Read what is actually claimed. Authorship. God does not offer to fix the mouth and does not say the slowness was a mistake. He asks who made it, and the question is rhetorical, and the answer is Him.

You are carrying a mouth God claims to have made, and Exodus 4:11 has Him answer a complaint about speech by claiming the making of speech, and it is His Spirit who takes a conversation at a bush and lands it on a man who said nothing at a graveside two years ago.

Nothing gets replaced in that chapter

Consider how the rest of the exchange goes, because it is instructive and it is not sentimental.

God does not give Moses a new tongue. There is no verse where the slowness lifts. Later in the story Moses speaks, at length, repeatedly, to a king and to a nation, and nothing in the text suggests he ever became fluent by anybody's standards.

What God says next is that He will be with his mouth and teach him what to say. Not swap it. Be with it.

And it is worth being exact about how that goes on the ground, because Moses does not become a different man in the next chapter. He keeps objecting. He asks God to send somebody else, at which point Aaron gets brought in, and even that is not presented as a repair. It is an arrangement made around a man who stayed the way he was, and the man who stayed the way he was is the one whose name is on the book.

You are being accompanied rather than replaced, because the written word puts God with the mouth rather than exchanging it, and His Spirit is what turns an argument at a bush into eighteen months making sense.

And notice the strange middle of the verse. Who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind. God is claiming authorship over a whole range of human capacity, including the parts a person would not have chosen, and He says it to a man who is objecting on exactly those grounds.

You were never handed a defect He is embarrassed about, and Exodus 4 has God name the whole range as His own work in the middle of answering a complaint, and the same Spirit who was with that mouth is the one who fills.

Eighteen months is not a verdict

Now the file that has been getting thicker, because it is built on an assumption nobody ever handed him.

He assumed the filling would produce fluency. Where that came from is not mysterious: the people who talk about this are, almost by definition, people who are good at talking, and a man listening to them will draw a conclusion nobody intended him to draw.

There is no verse that promises fluency. There is a verse where God says He will be with a slow man's mouth, and it is the same slow mouth, and the man goes on to do the whole of what he was sent to do with it.

And it is worth saying what did change, because something did. Eighteen months ago he asked, and he has been asking things since that he did not ask before, and the woman at the graveside is on a list in his head that did not exist in his forties. A man who has started to notice the sentence he did not say is not a man in whom nothing has moved. He is a man measuring the movement with the wrong instrument.

You were never promised a different mouth, because Exodus 4:11 answers the complaint with authorship rather than repair, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a relief rather than one more line in a file.