The page is a kind of refuge.
When I sit at the desk to draft a column, no one is watching me. I can write a sentence and unwrite it. I can stare at the cursor for 10 minutes and no one knows. The page lets me revise myself into something a little better than I actually am. That is a comfort most writers know.
Many writers know it so well that they avoid speaking in public at all costs. I have watched genuinely gifted writers fall apart at conference podiums, mumbling at the screen behind them, hands trembling on the lectern, the prose that read beautifully in print landing flat in the room. Writing well is no guarantee of speaking well. They are different skills aimed at different rooms.
Which brings me to Pentecost, which the church remembers today.
The story in Acts 2 is extraordinary, even if you do not read it as scripture. A group of Jesus’ followers was gathered in a single room in Jerusalem. They had been there for weeks, mostly hidden, talking among themselves. Then something arrived (wind, fire, the Spirit, depending on which word you trust), and they walked outside and began to speak.
The crowd in the street was a festival crowd, pilgrims from across the empire, speaking dozens of languages. Each one heard the disciples in their own native tongue. Peter, the same man who weeks earlier had denied even knowing Jesus when a servant girl asked him, stood up and preached. Whatever you make of the cause, the shape of the moment is clear. People who had been speaking quietly inside a room found themselves speaking publicly to strangers, in registers they couldn’t have studied for.
This is the voice you did not know you had.
Most of us will not be handed tongues of fire. We will be handed something more ordinary and just as difficult. The leader who must address the whole company after the layoffs. The parent who has to speak at the school board meeting. The neighbor pulled to their feet at the meeting they had only meant to attend.
Shakespeare’s line from Twelfth Night still applies: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. The people who carry a message are usually not the ones who sought the microphone. They are the ones the moment found.
I think of King George VI, who stammered. I think of every minister I know who didn’t plan to become a minister. They feel themselves called to speak before they know what they will say. The voice surfaces because nothing else will. They are not there for the adulation. They are there because the people in the room are asking a question, and silence would itself be a kind of answer.
Next week, we follow that voice past the room of welcome. Past the people who came to hear. The first Christian sermon was preached on a street to strangers. The voice that surfaces in us was never meant to stay in the room.
Scott Tilley is the founder of CTS Ministries and an emeritus professor at the Florida Institute of Technology. You’ll be able to find this column, Spirituality Today, every Sunday at floridatoday.com. Contact Tilley at stilley@cts.today.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: The unexpected voice that surfaces when you need it | Spirituality Today
Reporting by Scott Tilley, Florida Today / Florida Today
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