I Understand It And Cannot Say It

You understood every word of it and you could not say one back.

That is what happened at the table on Sunday, and it is what has happened at every table since you were small. They talk and you follow. Not most of it. All of it. You know who is annoyed with whom and what the joke was and what your uncle said about the car, and none of it required any effort at all.

And then somebody turned to you and asked you something directly, and you answered in English.

You have been doing this for thirty five years.

Here is the shape of it, and I want to lay it out plainly because I think it has never been described to you in a way that made sense.

The whole of the language went in and none of it comes out. It went in when you were three, from a grandmother who spoke it to you constantly and never once required you to answer in it, and so you grew a complete ear and no mouth at all, and the arrangement has been sealed since about the time you started school.

I want to say the true thing before anything useful.

This is its own particular kind of ache, and it is worse than being a beginner, and the people who tell you how lucky you are to understand it do not understand what they are saying.

A beginner has nothing and knows it. You have the whole thing and cannot reach it, which is a different and more frustrating condition, and it comes with a specific humiliation attached: you have to sit in a room where you understand every single word and be treated as the one who does not speak it.

So I am not going to tell you that understanding is half the battle. It is most of the battle and that is exactly the problem, because the half you are missing is the half that anybody can see.

Prophesy upon these bones

There is a scene in Ezekiel about something complete and unmoving, and about what gets it up.

The prophet is set down in a valley full of bones, and asked whether they can live, and he says God knows. And then he is given an instruction that is strange and very specific.

Again he said unto me, Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. (Ezekiel 37:4, King James Version)

Say unto them.

Now the thing I want you to see is what he is asked to do, because it is not what anybody would do with a valley of bones. He is not asked to assemble them. He is not asked to arrange anything or to work on them with his hands.

He is asked to speak at them out loud.

You have been asked for the one thing you have been avoiding, and speaking out loud has never once been a smaller act than working quietly. Ezekiel 37:4 puts the whole instruction in the mouth rather than in the hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting with a woman who has understood everything and said nothing for thirty five years.

Now notice what was already in that valley before he said anything.

Everything. Every bone was present. Nothing was missing and nothing had to be fetched from anywhere else, and the entire content of what stood up at the end of that chapter was lying there the whole time.

What was absent was not material. It was a voice.

You have every piece of this already in you, and a complete thing lying still has never once been the same as a thing that is not there. The Holy Spirit is the one with a woman who has a whole language inside her and no door out of it, and Ezekiel 37:4 begins with everything already present in the valley.

And here is the third thing, which is the part that will be hard to hear and is the most useful.

He had to say it before anything happened. There is no version of that chapter where the bones move first and he speaks afterward once it is clearly working. The speaking comes first, into a valley where nothing has yet moved, and it must have felt absurd.

You are permitted to speak before there is any evidence it will work, and a word said into silence has never once been a foolish word. Ezekiel 37:4 has the prophesying happen before one bone has stirred, and the Spirit of God is the one with a woman who answers in English at her own family table.

The mouth is a separate muscle

Here is the practical half, and it is the thing that will change how you think about the last thirty five years.

Understanding and speaking are two different systems, and they have been getting treated as one.

That is not a metaphor. Following a language and producing it use different machinery, and one can be complete while the other is untouched. This is extremely common among people raised in exactly that house, and it is not evidence of anything at all about ability.

Your grandmother spoke to you and let you answer in English, every day, for years, with the best intentions in the world. She fed your ear and never once asked your mouth for anything.

You were never failing at something, and an untouched muscle has never once been the same thing as a weak one. The Spirit of God is the one with a woman who grew a complete ear and no mouth, and Ezekiel 37:4 puts the instruction in the mouth of a man standing in a valley that already has everything in it.

Now here is the good news about that, and it is genuinely good.

Your situation is about four months of work, not four years. Everybody else who wants to speak that language has to build the ear first, which is the long expensive part, and then build the mouth on top of it.

You already have the ear. All that remains is to start moving the other muscle, and it moves quickly when the ear is there to correct it, because you will hear your own mistakes as you make them.

You have the whole of the slow half already finished, and a mouth with a complete ear behind it has never once taken as long as one without. Ezekiel 37:4 speaks into a valley where everything needed is already lying there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a silent woman to make the first sound.

And here is the fear, said plainly, because there is one and it is specific.

If you start speaking, they will find out how bad it is. At the moment the family thinks of you as the one who understands, which is a respectable position. The first time you try a sentence, everybody in that kitchen will discover that the woman who follows everything cannot produce a simple sentence, and that is a long way to fall in one afternoon.

You were never as high up as the fall you are imagining, and a family that has known you thirty five years has never once been in any doubt about this. The Spirit of God is the one with a woman protecting a position nobody assigned her, and the written word has a man speak out loud into a valley before anything at all has moved.

One word, out loud, at that table

So here is the assignment, and it is tiny on purpose because your obstacle is not size.

Learn one word your family would have used and say it to somebody in the family.

And for you the learning half is already done. You know hundreds of them. So the assignment is only the second half: take one word you already understand and put it out of your mouth, out loud, at that table, to a person.

One word. Not a sentence. The word for the dish being passed, said as you pass it.

You have every word you need already sitting in you, and a word you have understood for thirty years has never once needed to be learned again before it can be said. Ezekiel 37:4 asks for speech into a valley that is already full, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman passing a dish and saying its name.

And here is what to expect, because something will happen and it will not be a fall.

The table will stop for a second. Somebody will say it back. Your aunt may ask for something else and nothing will come, and that is fine and it is not the collapse this has been dressed up as.

Then go back to English. Immediately, with no apology, in the middle of the same conversation. That is allowed and it is the whole mercy of this assignment: one word does not commit you to a conversation, and nobody is entitled to more from you today. Then stop, because one word is the assignment.

You have permission to say one word and go straight back into English, and one word out loud has never once been a promise of a sentence. The Spirit of God is the one at that table when a woman finally makes a sound, and Ezekiel 37:4 begins with a single instruction to speak and nothing else.