The Accent You Apologize For

He does it before he has finished the first sentence. Every time.

Sorry, my English.

He has lived in this country for nineteen years. He runs a business. He has argued with a bank manager and won. He reads three languages, which is two more than the person he is apologizing to.

And every time he opens his mouth in a room where he is not certain of the temperature, out it comes, ahead of whatever he was actually going to say, like a man putting his hands up before anybody has accused him of anything.

Sorry, my English.

Now here is the part that would break your heart if you watched it closely enough.

Sometimes he says it after a sentence that was perfect. Genuinely perfect. Better phrased than the room deserved, with a word in it that half the people present would have had to look up. And out it comes anyway, on reflex, because the apology is not a report on the sentence. It arrived long before the sentence and it is not about English at all.

It is about a persistent conviction that the mouth he was given is a mouth that needs excusing.

And that conviction has consequences that nobody sees. He does not pray out loud. Not ever, not once, in nineteen years, in a room with other people in it. He has been asked. He has a way of turning it aside that is so smooth nobody has ever noticed it happening.

Now put him down a moment, and count today.

How many times today did you apologize for your own voice?

God asked a question that has only one answer

There is an argument in the desert between God and a man, and it is one of the most human passages in the whole Bible, and the man is losing it very badly.

Moses has been given an assignment. He has run out of practical objections and he has arrived at the last one, which is the real one, the one underneath all the others.

Pardon Your servant, Lord. I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor since You have spoken to Your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.

That is a man apologizing for his own mouth to the One who gave it to him.

And God does not reassure him. He does not say your speech is fine. He does not do what a kind friend would do. He asks a question.

The Lord said to him, Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go; I will help you speak and will teach you what to say.Exodus 4:11 and 12

Four questions and one instruction, and the instruction is the short one. You have been told to go rather than to improve first, and the Holy Spirit never once asked a man to be eloquent before He would fill his mouth.

Four questions and then an instruction, and every one of the questions has the same answer, and God gives it Himself because Moses is not going to.

Now hear what that does to nineteen years of apologizing.

You are not carrying a defective instrument. The word says God asked who made the human mouth and answered His own question, and the Spirit has never once required a person to be eloquent before He filled them.

And I want to say something more particular, because in my part of the world we do not let a man off with generalities.

The apology is not humility. I say that with respect and I say it as somebody who has heard himself do it. Humility is a way of holding a gift. What the apology does is hand the gift back at the door, before the room has even had a chance to receive it, and it does it so quickly that it looks like manners.

And it teaches the room. That is the part that costs the most. When you apologize for your mouth before you speak, the room learns to hear you as somebody who needs allowances made, and then the room makes them, kindly, and you are confirmed in the very thing that is not true.

The word says God said now go, I will help you speak. Not once your speech improves. Now.

The fire this house is named for fell in 1906 on a room in Los Angeles where a great many of the people had heavy accents, and immigrants three months off a boat with almost no English were on the same plank as everybody else. Nobody translated for the Holy Spirit. He fell on the room, and the room spoke.

And you are carrying an instrument God made rather than one He tolerates. Exodus 4 says He asked who gave human beings their mouths and then answered His own question, and the Spirit fell on a room where half the voices were three months off a boat.