When You Would Rather Stay Quiet

Category: Reflection · 3 min read

There is a version of obedience that does not look heroic. It looks like a quiet not me that takes years to become a quiet yes. This post is for the part of you that is still wrestling.

You know the thing.

You don't have to think hard about it. It surfaced the second you started reading — the thing you've known you were supposed to do for a while now, and haven't done.

Maybe it's a conversation you owe somebody. Maybe it's praying out loud at your own table instead of waiting for someone else to. Maybe it's saying something true to your kid about where you actually are with God, instead of the version you've been performing.

You haven't refused it. That's the strange part. You've never once said no.

You've just stayed quiet and hoped it would pass to somebody else.

I want to say something about that, because I think most of us assume the quiet is the problem. That real faith would have moved by now. That the people who actually follow God do it the way it looks in the sermon illustration — clean, immediate, unhesitating.

That is not how it goes in the book.

Moses spends forty years in the desert, and when the bush finally burns and God tells him what he's for, his answer is not yes, Lord. It's an argument. Who am I to do this (Exodus 3:11). What if they ask me your name (3:13). What if they don't believe me (4:1). I'm not good with words — I never have been (4:10). And when he's out of reasons, when there's nothing left to hide behind, he says the most honest thing in the whole exchange: please send somebody else (Exodus 4:13).

He gets sent anyway.

Not because he talked himself into enthusiasm. He never did. He went with the objection still in his mouth and his brother tagging along to do the talking.

That's what I want you to sit with. The yes that eventually came out of Moses was not a brave yes. It was a worn-down one. And it counted.

There's another one I think about. Gideon is threshing wheat in a winepress — down in a hole, out of sight, doing openly-impossible work in a hidden place because it isn't safe to do it in the open. And that's where he gets called a mighty warrior (Judges 6:11–12). Not after. During. While he's hiding.

His first response is to point out that his clan is the weakest one and he's the least in his father's house (6:15).

He wasn't wrong about any of that. He was just wrong about what it meant.

Here is what I've come to think. The wrestling isn't evidence that you've failed to obey. Very often it's evidence that you actually understand what's being asked of you. The people who say yes instantly are sometimes the ones who haven't done the math yet — who don't know what it's going to cost, or who they'll have to become, or what happens if it doesn't work.

You know. That's why you're quiet.

I'm not going to tell you to hurry. Some yeses take years to arrive, and the years are not wasted. The not me wears down slowly, in the direction of a yes you couldn't have manufactured on your own.

But don't leave the conversation.

That's the only thing I'd ask. Stay in it. Keep bringing the objection back to the One who can actually answer it, instead of going silent and calling that peace.

Because the part of you that is still wrestling is not the part that's failing.

It's the part that's still listening.

If something here resonated with you, The Direction Series was written for exactly where you are. I would love to invite you in — you can find it at directionseries.com.

The Porchlight is on. 🔆
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