“Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants
to speak your word with great boldness.”
to speak your word with great boldness.”
~ Acts 4:29
In another lifetime, I attended the Spanish Basic Course at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of San Francisco, California as part of my initial Army training program. While studying Spanish all day, every day for months on end got a bit tedious after awhile, it was a wonderful assignment I enjoyed. But I can’t say the same for all my friends. One friend in particular was a young private named Quinn. This young Texan hated the Army even more than most of the rest of us did. And he hated Spanish as well. So he wasn’t a very pleasant fellow to be around for the most part. Unfortunately, Quinn was my roommate.
Since I’ve never been particularly good at learning languages, I had to hit the homework pretty hard every evening for the duration of the program. On graduation day, the rest of my class enjoyed mocking me shamelessly for being the only one in our class successfully completing all our Spanish workbooks, yet still only graduating 12th out of 20 students. Big sigh! All my studying and hard work still left me thoroughly mediocre as a Spanish linguist. I wouldn’t develop survivable Spanish skills until I began to work in Latin America and, eventually, by marrying a cute, long-haired dictionary. But I sure worked hard in that first Spanish class.
Quinn had a different strategy. He did the bare minimum amount of homework and, when forced to speak Spanish in class, he would intentionally mumble his answers and hope the teachers would graciously give him the benefit of the doubt. Surprisingly, they almost always did! Disgusted with his attitude one evening, I confronted him. I asked him if he actually thought mumbling his answers was going to accomplish anything or work very long. Regardless of your view of the military or present situation, I argued knowing a foreign language might be a very handy and marketable skill some day. Why not make the most of it? But Quinn was unmoved by my argument and just laughed at me. “Relax Hanson; mumbling makes the world go round!” Eventually Private Quinn’s mumbling strategy became broadly known among almost all the students in the class. Soon others in the class were trying to do the same thing, but none with Quinn’s success. It eventually became something of a game in our class – how long was Quinn going to keep this up and how long were the rest of us going to be able to keep from laughing out loud. Sometimes Quinn had to work so hard to come up with an appropriate sounding mumble, it would have been easier just to learn and say the right words! For a while, in the tedium of endless language classes, it was all actually pretty funny.
Eventually however, the game was up. Eventually the “Dragon Lady,” Señora McKinney, not known for subtlety and Christian grace, realized young Private Quinn was playing her. This was the same woman who would regularly get frustrated at my inability to pronounce something correctly, stand heatedly over my desk and loudly yell to the world, “You so stupid, Mr. Hanson! Why you no can say?!” If there was one instructor ready to pounce on a lazy, mumbling student, it was the Dragon Lady. And pounce she did. It wasn’t pretty…
For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about Private Quinn’s mumbling strategy lately.
It seems to me a lot of Christians are trying to play the same foolish game. Instead of learning to speak clearly, speak truthfully and biblically, risking error, rejection and confrontation, we hang our heads low and mumble out our Christian answers to the world’s hard questions and challenges. Either because we don’t know the answers ourselves or simply because we don’t know the answers well enough to speak confidently, we mumble out our meandering thoughts and hope we’ll be given the benefit of the doubt in class. And surprisingly, since the world around us has grown so very accustomed to mumbling and meaningless babble, we are usually given the benefit of the doubt.
But we all know one day we’re going to have to know the answers. We’re going to have to speak the language. We’re going to have to clearly and unequivocally communicate what we actually know and believe. Mumbling isn’t a strategy that will work for very long.
So I’m asking God to help me see where I’m still trying to get by with mumbling.
Am I mumbling about what the Bible says about the utterly unique, spiritual singularity of Jesus? Am I mumbling about the Bible’s extremely clear standards of morality and Christian discipline? Am I mumbling about sin and the very real possibility of an eternity of suffering apart from God for those who refuse God’s offers of grace? Am I mumbling about righteousness and the joy of a lavishly generous Christian life? Am I mumbling about justice instead of speaking clearly and boldly the prophetic words the Bible gives us to shout?
It seems to me Easter is not a mumbled event. Yet am I mumbling about the life of Jesus; about the awful things that happened on Golgotha’s hillside or the glorious Resurrection Day just a few days later? Am I mumbling about Easter or do I speak clearly, boldly and happily?
Am I trying to Quinn this thing somehow?
I don’t think mumbling accomplishes anything. I’m going to try real hard to stop. Real hard!
May the Risen Christ speak clearly, boldly and joyously through my life and yours!
May all the mumbling stop and joyous clarity begin!
Amen.
