Study To Be Quiet

It was in an email, and that is the part that has made it impossible to put down.

If somebody had said it to her, she could have half remembered it and softened it over time and eventually let it go, the way you do with things that were said. But it was written down, in a review of the team, kindly framed, six words in the middle of a paragraph about something else.

Can come across as unenthusiastic in worship.

She read it in the car park at half past eight in the evening, and she has read it since, because she still has it, because it is in an email folder and she has never deleted it and she knows exactly which one.

She is thirty-eight and it has been two years.

What it did was not what the person writing it intended. It gave her a word. Before the email she had a temperament; after it, she had a diagnosis, and diagnoses attach to things. It attached to her worship first, and then to how she prays, and then, over about eighteen months, to her whole sense of what she is like as a Christian.

She stands where she has always stood. She sings, quietly, the way she has always sung. And she watches herself doing it now, from about three feet outside herself, and grades it.

The one place it is an instruction

Paul writes to a church and gives them a set of aims, and one of them will surprise you if you have never noticed it.

And that ye study to be quiet, and to do your own business, and to work with your own hands, as we commanded you.1 Thessalonians 4:11

Study to be quiet.

The word study there means to be ambitious about, to make it your aim, to strive after. It is an energetic word attached to a quiet object, which is why it sits oddly and why it stays with you once you have seen it.

Quietness is not appearing here as something tolerated in people who cannot manage anything better. It is being handed out as an aim, to a whole church, alongside minding your own affairs and working with your hands.

You are living toward something Scripture hands out as an instruction rather than excuses as a limitation. That is not me finding a proof text for your personality; 1 Thessalonians 4:11 makes quietness the object of an energetic verb, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an apostle's aim and lays it beside six words in an email folder.

What a word does

Now let me talk about the email itself, because the injury is not really the assessment.

Somebody made an observation. It was one person's read of how you come across, and it may even have been accurate as a description of what is visible, and being visible is not the same as being true about a person.

But it arrived as a word, and words are different from observations. A word can be applied. It can be extended. Once you have unenthusiastic you can hold it up against anything, and over two years you have held it up against your worship, your praying, your reading, and eventually against what kind of Christian you are, and none of that was in the email.

You have done more with those six words than the writer could have imagined, and they have been in a folder the whole time doing nothing at all.

You have been extending a description into a verdict for two years. The written word makes quietness an aim rather than a failing, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been applying that word to a woman's worship for two years.

And the guard, which this site always keeps: none of this means the enthusiastic ones are performing. They are not. Their worship shows because that is what it does in them, and the same Paul who told a church to study to be quiet also told people to be filled with the Spirit and to sing out loud to each other, and neither instruction cancels the other.

You are not the corrected version of anybody, and no register was ever the required one. Scripture hands quietness out as an aim and never once as a lesser setting, and the Holy Spirit has been meeting a woman standing exactly where she has always stood.