watch your language
“You need to get with it,” I say to Riley, like I do nearly a dozen times a day, then I jot down the phrase. Get with it. I taste the words a little, stare down at the shape of them, the jerking movement of the letters.
Kirk Byron Jones has me watching my language for a week, has me wondering in what tongue I speak. Is my language creating a culture of hurry not just for myself but for my people?
“I’m on it, Mom Jones,” Riley says, although she stands still looking over my shoulder, stretching to stall for time, watching me write the words in my notebook. For the last fifteen minutes, she has mildly interrogated me about logistics, trying to wrap her mind around how changes to her routine will actually happen, unfolding potential landmines of anxiety. The conversation, while meandering, awkward, and forcibly casual, has also been submissive and trusting, like the prayers I sometimes speak in spiritual words in the middle of a trying week.
Get with it. I speak urgency as my mother tongue, when she draws near me for safe harbor. I push away from my desk and swivel the chair to take in the sight of her more completely. She sweeps aside her thick, brassy hair, gathering it in her hands, pulling it up off of her neck. These thoughts about next week interrupted her progress. I can see that she’s been preparing for a shower; she’s removed her jewelry. She drops her hair and idly rubs her wrist, running her thumb along the bare spot where her watch normally rests, as though reading my thoughts. She has more questions; I can see them hiding behind her eyes.
“Take your time,” I say at last, choosing a different language, turning my hands up in my lap so that we both see them empty and still. I don’t like to be rushed. Those words must be the most direct ones she speaks, not now, but often enough that I know them by heart. When she says them, her eyes fill with tears. Go slow. Leave time. It’s one of the first things an Autism mom learns about love.
She blinks, surprised by my change of course, surprised even more to have my full attention.
“Mom Jones,” she begins pensively, and I wait. Listen, my heart tells me. Just listen.
“Mmm?”
“In Christ, urgent means slow.” I read it just this morning, sitting alone with God in the crisp newness, in that early light. Ann Voskamp’s words, I underlined them twice. Pages later, I underlined this too:
Long, I am a woman who speaks but one language, the language of the fall–discontentment and self-condemnation, the critical eye and the never satisfied.
One Thousand Gifts Devotional, 55
I wonder now if a woman like me can learn to be multilingual, but in the drawling Kingdom tongues, instead of this rushing, hurting hurry. The Word has much to warn about words, how praising and cursing shouldn’t flow from the same spring (James 3:10-11); how I should say only what builds up and benefits (Ephesians 4:29); how the language I use overflows my own heart (Luke 6:45). So, why I wonder, eyes drifting to my week long list, is my heart looking so much like the rapids?
God speaks victory, love, freedom, grace, thanksgiving. These are Spirit-taught words (1 Corinthians 2:13). Yes, and He speaks them slow, because I have spiritual Autism and my mind just can’t process spiritual realities quickly. “Be still and know that I am God,” He says (Psalm 46:10), because real relationships take time.
I look at Riley carefully now, let love make me see her deliberately untangling her own slippery fear in front of me.
“Umm, who will help me pack my lunch? Because I don’t know how I’ll be able to do that in time.” She twists the hem of her t-shirt into a taught rope and wraps it around her own fist.
“YHWH has sent me…to proclaim freedom for the captives (Luke 4:18),” Jesus said. I reach for Riley’s nervous, self-bound hands.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, willing myself to say it slow so she has time to hear the language of freedom, “I will help you. We have time to do it together.” Be sure of this: I am with you always (Matthew 28:20). It happens so subtly I scarcely recognize when the current changes, when it happens that Love tramples down those gates and overflows my heart; how it finally spills right out of my mouth.
~*~
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