The Day I Stopped Talking

I imposed a 24-hour no talking rule on myself, and this is what happened

Hey Readers! Fair warning: stuff’s about to get REAL. I’ve got some vulnerability to share, and I’ll start by owning that at least a strong part of me is an 8 on the enneagram (“the challenger”). As such, the emotion that often really powers me is anger. That can be a powerful force for change in the world. It can also get me into trouble at times.

I care a lot about matters of justice: social justice on the one hand (great!). On the other hand, making sure justice is served in my own personal affairs (selfish motives: not so great). As a child, “it’s not fair!” came out of my mouth with as much regularity as “Are we there yet?” intuits out of the mouth of a kid on a 20-hour car ride to Disney.

So when, as an adult, I experience the pain of this world (aka: the gap that exists between the way things ought to be and the way things actually are), and I can’t readily do something about it or fix it on the spot, I tend to run my mouth as an alternative. And this mouth can run. In moments of stress, it turns to four-letter words.

So what’s the big deal?

Like a good proverb, Ann Voskamp shares that the tongue is a tail of the heart. Likewise, there are so many wise sayings from the actual book of Proverbs that warn about the power of the tongue: for good or for bad. When I read them, I am convicted. Every darn time. Day after day, week after week, year after year, I seem to be continuously failing in this department. I’ve tried so many things (I could probably write a post about each one) to prevent the trucker mouth from coming out of me in moments of conflict. It. Is. My. Weakness. We all have that one temptation that is more ours to bear. This is mine.

In moments of stress, it turns to four-letter words.

Christian author, Jennie Allen says in the Emotions series of her “Made for This” podcast, “Emotions do not equal sin, but a lot of us sin because of our emotions.” I think this is an important distinction for a couple of reasons, but the one I want to highlight here is this: I’m not saying cussing has to be a big deal for everyone. Cussing takes on a variety of forms. But when I’ve dropped f-bombs in front of, or (gasp) directed toward my little ones, to the point where my four-year-old is embarrassingly repeating the word and using it in its proper context with remarked accuracy, I have to admit I am missing the mark of the love and grace of God I so deeply want to reflect. Ouch. My flesh fails me. (Romans 7:14-20)

“Emotions do not equal sin, but a lot of us sin because of our emotions.” -Jennie Allen

I hate it. I want to do what is right, and I want to be rid of this sin, but I seem to keep going back to it. In a moment of heat, the thought of breathing it out for ten seconds before speaking the emotion seems lost on me. It boils down to a loss of control that is probably rooted in some deeper thing I’m idolizing, and I hurt others in the process.

“I am missing the mark of the love and grace of God I so deeply want to reflect.”

So you know what?! Desperate times call for desperate measures. (We won’t even get into the fact that a painful virus plagued my literal tongue and infected my kids’ mouths too for nearly an entire summer that neither my natural practitioner, my kids’ pediatrician or the ENT could explain or pinpoint its exact cause.) Chalk it up to one more thing that was not so conveniently calling my attention to radical change. But I digress.

The Bible says that if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off, and even to gouge out your eye if it’s causing you to stumble. It would be better to go without it, Jesus challenges. So, while I wasn’t going to cut my tongue off, I rendered it incapacitated for 24 hours. You heard me. I instituted a “day of silence.” Being a mom of three children, I would have to be strategic about finding a day I could realistically imagine this even being possible, while on the other hand not making it too easy on me. When the other moms in my huddle (aka: small group) heard my plans, I think they thought I was krazy with a capital K…or maybe just plain crazy. But I told them I had to do it.

Of course, the night before my 24 hours of silence commenced, I explained to my children what I was going to be doing. More importantly, I told them why I was doing it. It’s painfully easy to sum it up for a child: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all!” (Now don’t I feel like a hypocrite?) I explained how God was convicting me, and how this was going to be Mom practicing better self-control so I could get better at expressing the love I have for them, even in the hard moments. It was a memorable lesson for them, for sure, as they watched their mother do the hard work of choosing to live by the Spirit and not the flesh.

What I learned from my 24 hours of silence:

1. Silence can be GOLDEN.

I mentioned that the tongue is a tail to the heart. Cut off the tongue, and your heart is exposed in a different kind of way. My thoughts became more apparent, for better or worse, when they lingered in my brain, unable to be voiced. I no longer had free rein to press my emotions and thoughts of inadequacy, frustration, hurt, pain, etc., onto other people. I was left to deal with it, just me and God. The ironic part about my “day of silence” is that God spoke to me a lot that day. Funny, right? When I got quiet, God’s whisper became relatively louder.

“Cut off the tongue, and your heart is exposed in a different kind of way.”

There are a handful of times in the Bible where God actually took a physical sense or ability away from someone temporarily so they could be trained in spiritual hearing or seeing. Take the example from Paul’s life that I wrote about HERE. Likewise, Zechariah was temporarily made dumb: he lost his words so that he could hear THE WORD.

2. Silence is crucial to our freedom.

I have a Real Simple magazine clipping hung on my refrigerator that’s been there for five years and even survived a switch in appliances. It says, “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” – Viktor E. Frankl. In a response to the Holocaust survivor/psychiatrist’s famous quote, Maria Popova wrote for the magazine, “We live in a rapid-fire culture, the result of which is that rather than responding—intelligently, thoughtfully, reflectively—we just react, be it by acting or by forming hasty opinions. In doing so, we lose capacity for critical thinking and compassion, and we lose access to our beliefs and moral ideals.”

Wow. Our world is in information overload, and even if it didn’t come naturally to our flesh, our world would quickly teach us to spew it out at the same rapid-fire pace—our thoughts and opinions, our initial reactions and uninhibited responses. #nofilter, am I right?!

But in my self-orchestrated 24 hours of silence, I temporarily smoldered the rapid-fire. As you could probably have guessed, a mother can’t really just take a day off. Post-it notes and a pen became my best friend for the day: writing instructions for my husband on who was going where that day and the logistics of making it all happen.

The slowing down effect of the written word, whether journaling or writing a letter, or in this case, even simple daily instructions to my family, is an invaluable tool. It is calculated and slow. You can think through what you really want to say and how best to say it with not only truth, but with restoration in mind. There were moments when I felt my hot head getting ahead of my pen. However, because my hand couldn’t move that fast, I couldn’t choose to move those thoughts into action. By the time I was to that place on the paper, I no longer felt the need to articulate every last whim of emotion. (For the record, texting does NOT have the same effect. Our thumbs have gotten way too fast for that.) Because writing expends more energy than simply talking, it caused me to evaluate the necessity of and prioritize which things I should verbalize.

3. In silence, I can hear God.

I’ll close with this. I recently wrote an entire post on the confusing message of “Be still” because it happens to be the antithesis of our culture. Since writing that post, I’ve stumbled upon an alternative translation of that verse that I had not yet learned: The ESV translates Exodus 14:14, “Be silent.” (emphasis added.) Silence, then, precedes knowing God. (Psalm 46:10)

Be quiet and do the hard work of hearing the truth. When I slow the cycle of my emotion down, there is truth tucked away in the crevices. It has been nearly two years since I said no words for an entire day, and I am still learning how to have more success than failure in this, learning how to control my emotions rather than allowing them to control me. But with the high risk of leaving our comfort zone, there is also high reward. Below is a screenshot of the Bible app’s “Verse of the Day” the very day after I went silent for 24 hours. Would you believe it!?

And with that, I’ll keep at it.

For the original story featured on Mops International’s blog, click HERE.

What about you? What parts of my story do you relate to? Let’s try this vulnerability thing together. Leave a comment.

POSTED BY

Jenna

Jenna Kruse is a teacher but not in a classroom. She loves to think outside the box and inside the Word and is daily in need of an attitude adjustment. She is a wife to Justin, a mother to three children ages 10, 8 and 5 and a mentor to teenagers and young adults. You can learn more about the heart behind her blog HERE.

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