I Talk Too Much And Drive Home Ashamed

The car is where it happens.

You get about four minutes down the road and it starts. The story you told that went slightly too long. The thing you said about your cousin that was meant lightly. The moment you realized you had been talking for a while and could not find a way to land it, so you kept going, which made it worse.

By the time you are home you have replayed the whole afternoon twice and arrived at a verdict, and the verdict is always the same, and you have been delivering it to yourself for about twenty years.

And nobody in that family thinks about it for one second after you leave. That is true and it does not help, because the trial is not being held in their car.

Why the talking happens

Let me start where it actually starts, which is not at the table.

It starts in the doorway, with a small rise of something in your chest, and the talking is what you do with it. A silence in a room where you feel slightly unsure is unbearable, so you fill it, and filling it works, for about eleven seconds, and then there is another one.

That is not a character flaw. That is a nervous system doing a job it was given years ago.

You have been managing a room with your own voice, and no amount of talking has ever once been able to produce the safety it was reaching for. Proverbs 10:19 says in the multitude of words there wanteth not sin, which is the written word describing volume rather than character, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can hold a person steady in a gap without them needing to fill it.

And here is the part that will help more than anything else in this article. The people in that room are not keeping score.

Somebody there is a whole person with their own worry about the afternoon. Your cousin has been braced about something entirely unrelated to you. Your aunt is right about a thing nobody has conceded. Not one of them drove home doing a tally.

You are surrounded by people who were not counting, and twenty years of a verdict has never once been delivered by anybody except you. The Spirit of God is what silences a court that only has one person in it, and it is written in Proverbs 10 that the multitude of words is the problem and not the speaker.

In the multitude of words

In the multitude of words there wanteth not sin: but he that refraineth his lips is wise. (Proverbs 10:19, King James Version)

Read that carefully, because it is easy to turn it into a stick and it is not one.

It does not say the talker is wicked. It says that in a great many words, something will go wrong. It is a statement about probability. Say enough sentences and one of them will land badly, not out of carelessness, but because that is arithmetic.

Which means the thing you have been convicting yourself for in the car is not evidence about your character. It is the expected outcome of volume.

You have been holding a trial about arithmetic, and one sentence that landed badly in four hours has never once been proof of anything about you. It is written in Proverbs 10:19 that in the multitude of words there wanteth not sin, which is the written word naming a probability, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends a court that has been sitting for twenty years.

And then the second half, which is the actual instruction: he that refraineth his lips is wise. Refrain is a word about holding back, not about being silent. It is a hand on a rein.

Not: never speak. Not: you talk too much and should stop. Hold the rein.

You are able to hold a rein rather than close a mouth, and refraining has never once been the same as having nothing to say. The Spirit of God is the one whose hand steadies a person mid sentence, and Proverbs 10 puts the wisdom in the holding back and never in the silence itself.

What to do with the gap

Here is the practical thing, and it is one move.

The next time a silence opens in that room, do not fill it. Count to four in your head instead.

That is all. Four seconds. And what you will find, almost every time, is that somebody else speaks at about three, because a silence in a room is not a hole that has to be filled by you, it is a space that several people are standing near.

You are permitted to let a room work without you, and four seconds of quiet has never once been an emergency somebody had to solve. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes four seconds bearable in a body that has spent twenty years finding them unbearable, and it is written that he that refraineth his lips is wise.

And there is a second thing, for the car. When the replay starts, say out loud: they were not counting.

Not as a comfort. As a fact. The trial is being held with no plaintiff, no witness and no charge, and it has been running for two decades on nothing at all.

You are driving home with nothing to answer for, and no afternoon of ordinary talking has ever once required a verdict afterward. The Spirit of God is the one who can stop a replay four minutes down the road, and Proverbs 10:19 puts the whole matter at the level of arithmetic and a rein.