I Am Bad at This

Let me put the same thing at the top of this one that goes at the top of all of them here, because it matters more than anything I have to say after it. This is not medicine. I am not a clinician, nothing on this page is treatment, and nothing I write here ever stands in the place of a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist. If somebody has you worried, get them seen. That is not fear. That is love with its shoes on.

Now. Somebody you love is unwell, and you have started finding reasons to be in a different room.

Not because you do not care. Because the last three times you went in there you heard your own voice come out and say something that landed wrong, and you have been running the tape ever since.

You said at least you are in the right place. You said everything happens for a reason, and you did not even believe it, it just came out. You said something bright and cheerful in a room that was not bright and cheerful, and you watched their face do the thing faces do, and you have been carrying it around for a week.

Somebody else said exactly this about their mouth

There is a man in Scripture who made your argument to God directly, and made it more than once, and I want you to see what happened to it.

And Moses said unto the LORD, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. (Exodus 4:10, King James Version)

That is your sentence. I am not good with words. I never have been. And I am no better at it now that the asking has come, either.

And the answer that comes back is not you are better than you think. It is a question about who made the mouth in the first place, followed by an instruction to go anyway.

You are being sent in with the mouth you actually have, and God has never once waited for somebody to become eloquent first. Exodus 4:10 has the objection made out loud and answered with a going rather than with an improvement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets an awkward person walk back into a room.

That is the part I would underline. God does not deny the problem. He does not tell Moses he is secretly a great speaker. He goes straight past the whole question of skill to the question of who sent him.

You have been arguing about a qualification nobody asked you for. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a person past their own audition, and what is written answers slow of speech with a question about who made the mouth.

The wrong sentence is not the disaster you think it is

Let me say something from a lot of years of doing this badly.

Sick people are not sitting in there scoring your sentences. Almost nobody remembers the exact words. What they remember for years afterwards is a much simpler thing: who came in, and who stopped coming in.

I have never in my life heard somebody say, she came every single day but she said the wrong thing in March. Not once. What I hear is, nobody came.

You are being weighed on the coming and not on the wording, and no household has ever once kept a transcript. Exodus 4:10 has God send a man whose speech was the known weak point and use him for the rest of his life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets somebody stop editing themselves at the door.

And here is the other half of it, which is harder. The avoiding is not protecting them. From inside that bed, a person who stopped coming does not read as considerate. It reads as gone.

You were never the one who had to get it right, and the room has never once needed a good speaker in it. The Spirit of God is the one who fills the gap between what a person meant and what came out, and it is written that the answer to a slow tongue was go, and I will be with thy mouth.

The plain routing, which is not awkward at all

Here is the one thing on this page that is not about comfort, and it is the easiest thing to say and the most important.

If something frightening is happening right now, you call 911, and you do it before you finish reading this. If the heavy thing tonight is in your own mind, 988 answers, and a real person picks up. And if the one you love has been unwell and nobody qualified has seen them, you ring a doctor, a nurse or a pharmacist, and you use the plainest words you own.

You are perfectly well equipped for that call, and nobody has ever once needed to be eloquent to make it. Exodus 4:10 has a man with a known difficulty go and speak to the most powerful person in the world anyway, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets somebody through a conversation they have been dreading.

There is no elegant way to say a thing like that on a phone. There does not need to be. The receptionist has heard every version of it and none of them were well put.

You have one call that needs no skill at all, and the passage has never once made the going wait on the speaking. The Spirit of God is the one who is present in a badly worded phone call, and what is written sends the slow tongue out with a promise of company rather than with lessons.