I Am Tired Of Nodding At Things

You nodded again this afternoon and you did not follow any of it.

Somebody was telling you something at length, and about nine words in you lost the thread, and you kept your face doing the right things. You made the small sounds. You nodded at what felt like the right places. You laughed once when her voice went up at the end, and you were fairly sure that was a joke.

And she finished, and you said something agreeable, and she seemed satisfied, and the two of you moved on.

You do this eight or ten times a day.

Here is what has started happening, and it is the reason you are reading this instead of getting on with your afternoon.

You have begun to feel dishonest.

Not lying exactly. Nobody could reasonably call it lying. But there is a small cold thing that arrives afterward, every time, and it has been arriving more often, and it feels like having agreed to something you never heard.

I want to say the true thing before I say anything useful.

That feeling is right, and it is not oversensitivity.

Something genuinely is happening in those conversations. You are performing comprehension you do not have, and the other person is walking away believing they were understood when they were not, and however small each one is, they are adding up into a version of you that does not quite exist.

So I am not going to tell you that everybody does it, or that it is a normal stage, even though both of those are true. Neither of them touches the cold thing, because the cold thing is not about whether it is normal.

Let me agree with you first.

In whose spirit there is no guile

There is a line in Psalm thirty two about a particular kind of relief.

Blessed is the man unto whom the LORD imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. (Psalm 32:2, King James Version)

Guile is the word to stay on.

It does not mean wickedness. It means the small managing of appearances. Arranging what people think they are seeing. Guile is what happens in the gap between what is actually going on inside somebody and what their face is reporting, and the psalm treats the absence of that gap as a blessing rather than as a moral achievement.

You have put your finger on something the written word names directly, and the discomfort of a managed face has never once been an oversensitive reading of it. Psalm 32:2 calls a person without that gap blessed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been making a good woman uncomfortable for a reason.

Now read what kind of thing the psalm calls it.

Blessed. Not required. Not commanded. The psalm is not scolding anybody into honesty. It is describing the condition of somebody who does not have to keep a face running, and calling that condition a happy one.

That is worth hearing, because you have been treating the nodding as a small politeness and the psalm treats putting it down as a relief.

You were never being asked to be better, and the tiredness in that face has never once been a fault in the woman wearing it. The Holy Spirit is the one who has been putting a cold feeling in an ordinary afternoon, and Psalm 32:2 calls the absence of the gap a blessing and not a duty.

And there is one more thing in the verse that matters here.

It sits directly beside a line about iniquity not being counted. The same breath that talks about the ungarnished spirit talks about not being tallied up. Which means the honesty in view here is not a performance for an auditor. It is what somebody is like when they have stopped expecting to be marked.

You have never once been kept on a scoreboard here, and the person who is not being counted has never once needed to manage what anybody sees. Psalm 32:2 puts the uncounted and the unguarded in the same sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one with a woman who has been keeping a face running since breakfast.

The nodding is what stopped the learning

Here is the practical half, and it is not the moral half.

Set the honesty question down for a minute, because there is a purely mechanical problem here and it is bigger than the conscience one.

Every nod ends a conversation.

Think about what happens when you nod. The other person concludes they were understood. They move on. The sentence you did not follow goes past permanently, and you never find out what was in it, and the exact word that lost you is still unknown to you an hour later.

Now think about what happens if you say I did not follow that. She says it again. Smaller, slower, different words. And in the second version you get most of it, and you also learn which word was the one, and that word is now yours in a way that no page could ever have made it yours.

You have been closing the only door the learning comes through, eight or ten times a day, for months. The Spirit of God is the one with a woman going cold after every kind conversation, and Psalm 32:2 puts the blessing on the one who has no gap to keep running.

And here is the piece that nobody warns anybody about.

It gets harder the longer it goes. If somebody has believed for a year that you follow them, saying I did not follow that today feels like a confession about the whole year. So the nodding compounds, and the cost of stopping rises, and that is why it has to be today rather than eventually.

You are standing at the cheapest moment this will ever have, and the price of one sentence has never once gone down by waiting. Psalm 32:2 calls the person without the managed face blessed rather than obligated, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a tired woman to say it this afternoon.

And one thing about the other person, because you have been protecting her.

She would rather know. Almost everybody would. The thing people find awkward is not a beginner asking them to repeat something. The thing people find awkward is discovering, later, that they have been talking to a face.

You were protecting her from something she never wanted protecting from, and being told has never once cost anybody the conversation. The Spirit of God is the one present in the four seconds after a woman says she did not follow it, and the written word puts the blessing squarely on the spirit with nothing arranged in it.

Say the five words instead of nodding

So here is the assignment, and it is smaller than stopping the nodding.

Say one sentence out loud to one person, badly, today.

And the sentence built for you is this one. I did not follow that. Five words, in her language, learned today, said once.

Not every time. Once. The first time today that you lose the thread and feel your face start to arrange itself, say those five words instead of nodding.

You have one sentence to learn and one nod to spend it on, and one honest five words has never once undone months of politeness. Psalm 32:2 blesses the spirit that is not managing anything, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets a good woman to let her face stop working this afternoon.

And here is what will actually happen, because it is almost never what people fear.

She will say it again. That is it. That is the whole event. She will slow down and use smaller pieces, and she will very likely be pleased, because people enjoy being understood and she will now have a chance at it.

You may have to say the five words twice in the same conversation. Fine. Nobody is counting, and Psalm thirty two has already said that out loud.

Then stop. One sentence. You may nod through the rest of the day with nothing owed to anybody, because one is the assignment and the assignment is not a new policy.

You have permission to nod at the next nine, and one honest answer has never once obligated a woman to a whole new way of being. The Spirit of God is the one who settles a tired woman afterward, and Psalm 32:2 hands the blessing over without attaching a requirement to it.