Saying It Louder

Ngozi has been getting louder for six years and she did not notice until somebody left the room.

Not stormed out. Nothing dramatic. A woman she has known a long time simply got up in the middle of what Ngozi was saying, quietly, the way you do when you need the bathroom, and did not come back, and afterwards said she had a headache, and probably did.

Ngozi believed her about the headache and thought about it for a month anyway.

Here is what she found, and she found it by listening to a recording of herself, which she does not recommend to anybody.

She has one register now. It used to have several. There was a version of her that could say a difficult thing quietly, at a table, to one person, and she can hear it on old recordings, and it is not a version she can currently produce.

What happened is not mysterious and it happened by inches.

She said something true. It was not heard. So the next time she said it with a bit more weight, because clearly it had not landed, and that made sense. That was not heard either, so the time after that she said it with more force, and once or twice the force worked, which is the part that made the whole thing inevitable.

Six years of that, and she is now a person who arrives at volume, and she has stopped being able to hear the difference between a room that is not listening and a room that has not been given a chance to.

You have your own version. There is a thing you say, and you have been adjusting one dial for years, and the dial only goes one way.

Nobody here is going to tell you that you were wrong to raise your voice. Sometimes it is exactly right and Scripture is full of people doing it.

But there is a scene on a mountain about where God located Himself, and it is the answer to six years of getting louder.

He was not in any of the loud things, and the loud things were His

There is a passage everybody half-remembers, and the detail that matters is the one that usually gets left out.

And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:12

Read the verse before it too. There is a great and strong wind that tears the mountains and breaks the rocks, and the Lord is not in the wind. Then an earthquake, and He is not in that. Then a fire, and He is not in that either.

Now notice something that gets missed. The wind, the earthquake and the fire are not intrusions. They are not the enemy showing off. They pass before the Lord, in the text, as part of the sequence. They are His, and they are genuinely enormous, and He is not in them.

That is not a verse against volume. It is a verse about location.

And it is said to a man who has just come off the single loudest event of his ministry. Chapter eighteen is fire from heaven in front of the whole nation, and it worked, and by chapter nineteen he is under a tree asking to die.

And you are not being told the loud times were wrong. That is not my hedging: the written word puts the wind and the earthquake and the fire in the sequence without a word against them, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that distinction land in a woman who has been listening to a recording of herself.

And He is not withholding Himself from you at volume. The word says He is not in the wind rather than that He is against it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a matter of where to look rather than a rebuke about how you have been speaking.

What the dial actually costs

Here is the practical part, and it is about the thing Ngozi lost rather than the thing she gained.

Volume is not free. Every increment buys attention in the short term and spends something else, and what it spends is your access to the rooms that would have listened at a normal register.

Because a person who arrives loud gets braced for. That is the mechanism. People who would have heard a quiet sentence begin, over years, to prepare themselves before you speak, and preparation is a kind of not-listening that looks exactly like attention.

So the dial that was supposed to solve not being heard has, over six years, produced a much more sophisticated version of not being heard.

And the woman with the headache probably did have a headache. Both things can be true.

And you have not damaged your gift. The word says the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance, and the Spirit is the one who keeps that clear in somebody who has just heard themselves on a recording and would quite like to stop existing for a bit.

And the quiet register is still available to you. The word says the meek He will guide in judgment and the meek He will teach His way, and meek in Scripture is strength with a bridle on it rather than weakness, and the Spirit is the one who teaches that rather than leaving somebody to manufacture it.

Nobody is telling you to be quieter as a technique

I want to be careful, because this could easily become a piece of advice about tone, and tone advice is what gets handed to people with something true to say in order to make them easier to sit next to.

That is not what this is.

Turning the volume down as a technique will not work and will make you resent the room. If you go into next week's meeting deliberately soft in the hope that softness will finally make them hear it, you have not changed anything at all: you have moved the same dial in the opposite direction for the same reason.

The change is not the volume. It is what the volume was doing.

It was carrying the burden of being heard. That was never yours. That is the thing to put down, and if it goes down the volume follows on its own, and if it does not go down no adjustment of tone will help.

And the outcome was never on your side of the table. The word says it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful, and faithfulness is the entire standard in that sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a genuine release rather than a lowered expectation.