I Am Slow Of Speech

He got most of the way through it. That is the part that stays with him.

The man had asked him a real question. Not small talk. A question about what happened to him, and why he still believes any of it after what he has been through, and it was asked properly, in a kitchen, with the kettle on.

And he had the answer. He has had the answer for thirty years. In his own language it takes about four minutes and it has made grown men put their cups down.

What came out was eleven words, three of them wrong, and a long pause that he could feel filling up the room, and then the man said something kind and changed the subject, which was the most generous thing available and was also the end of it.

Twenty years he taught. Not casually. A room, every week, and people came, and he was known for being able to take a hard passage and make an unlettered man see it.

He is fifty-four. He has been here two and a half years. He works with three people who like him and one who is patient with him in a way that is worse than impatience.

The sentence in the kitchen afterwards is not my language is being lost. It is: whatever I was for, it lived in words, and my words are gone.

You know that pause. It might be a language, or a stroke, or a stammer that came back, or a memory that no longer produces the word you need in the moment. Something you did with your mouth for years does not work here, and the not working feels like the end of your usefulness rather than a difficulty with speech.

The objection God had already heard

There is a conversation at a burning bush where a man makes exactly your objection, and he makes it plainly, and God's answer is not the one anybody expects.

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

I am slow of speech. Not a metaphor. The man says his mouth does not work well enough for the assignment, and he says it to God's face, and it is a fair objection.

And here is God's first answer, which most people skip in order to get to the part about Aaron: Who hath made man's mouth? He does not say your speech is better than you think. He does not correct the assessment. He asks a question about ownership, and He asks it in the present tense, about the mouth in question, the slow one.

You are a man whose mouth was made by God, and the making has not been revoked by an accent or a missing word. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft framing chosen for a man in a kitchen, and the Holy Spirit who has been in you for thirty years is the evidence that what you carry has never been stored in vocabulary.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic after that pause. If the mouth was made by Him and is still His, then eleven words with three wrong ones is information about two and a half years in a country whose grammar is not yours. It is not the size of what God sends, and it never had the standing to become that.

What God did not do

Here is the second thing, and it is where the honesty of this passage matters.

God did not make Moses eloquent. That is worth saying carefully. There is no verse where the slowness lifts. He gave him Aaron, and He gave him a staff, and the record of what Moses actually said in front of Pharaoh is short and blunt and repeated.

So nothing here will promise you fluency. Not in a year, not ever. Nobody on this page knows whether your speech in this language becomes easy, and telling you it will has been done to enough people by enough well meaning strangers.

What is here is that God has never once required eloquence before He sends somebody, and that the man in that conversation was sent exactly as he was, with the objection standing and unanswered.

You have been carried through all two and a half years of this, and the carrying was not paused while you learned grammar. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit at work through you rather than waiting for your sentences to come out right.

There is something else. That kitchen conversation is not lost. You do not know what eleven words and a long pause did in that man. You are assuming, from the inside, that it was nothing. From the outside a great many people have been marked more deeply by somebody visibly struggling to say something true than by four fluent minutes.

This is where your mouth comes into it, and yes, that is the word. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a man has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Spoken, however it comes out. And the thing in the way is not the language and it is not the colleague who is patient at you. It is a sentence: my words are gone. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a man with any authority after a pause in a kitchen. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in the accuracy of the grammar.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than embarrassment, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.