Finishing Other People's Sentences

Some people carry their hurry in their feet. You can see that kind coming. They move fast, they put things down hard, and everybody in the house knows what sort of day it has been before a word is said.

There is another kind and it does not show at all.

It sits perfectly still. It looks you in the eye. It nods in the right places. And the whole time, underneath, it is already working on the answer, and the answer is finished and waiting somewhere around the middle of your third sentence.

That kind of hurry never gets caught, because from the outside it looks exactly like attention.

I want to describe the moment, and see whether you recognize it. Somebody starts telling you a thing. Within about ten seconds you know where it is going, and you are almost always right, because you know this person and you have heard the shape of this before.

And from there on you are not listening. You are waiting. Politely, warmly, with your face doing all the right things, but waiting, because the useful part of you has already moved on to what you are going to say.

Then they stop, and you say the thing, and it is a good thing, and it helps, and the conversation was fine.

Except they did not get to finish. They got to the point where you had heard enough, which is a completely different place, and it is usually about two sentences short of the thing they had actually come to say.

Swift to hear is a strange thing to be swift at

There is a line in James that most people know half of, and the half they know is the second half.

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath. (James 1:19, King James Version)

Slow to speak gets quoted. Swift to hear does not, and swift to hear is the odd one, because speed is not usually what listening needs.

But look at what it is actually asking for. Swift to hear does not mean hear quickly and move on. It means be quick to get to hearing. Be eager for it. Be the first thing rather than the thing that happens while something else is being prepared.

And then slow to speak, which is not about talking slowly. It is about the speaking arriving later than it wants to.

Put the two halves together and you have a description of a person whose listening runs ahead of their answering, which is the exact opposite arrangement to the one most tired people are running.

You are able to get to hearing before you get to answering, and the order of those two has never once been fixed by how your mind works. James 1:19 puts swift on the hearing and slow on the speaking rather than the other way around, and it is the Holy Spirit who can reverse an order in a person that has been running the same way for thirty years.

Why the answer arrives early, and it is not selfishness

I want to say why this happens, because most people who do it think it means something bad about them, and it usually does not.

The answer arrives early because a person gets good at this. Somebody who has listened to a great many people has seen this shape before, and their mind does what a trained mind does. That is competence, not coldness.

And underneath the competence, in nearly every case, is something kinder still. You want to help. The reason for working on the answer is the wanting to have something useful ready, because this person is upset and you love them and you do not want to leave them sitting there with nothing.

So the early answer is not a failure of love. It is love in a hurry, and it costs the very thing it was trying to give.

You are doing this out of the best part of you, and the wanting to help has never once been the thing that needs correcting. James 1:19 asks for an order rather than for a different heart. The Spirit of God is the one who can slow a good instinct down without dampening it.

Here is what it costs, though, and it is worth being clear about. The last two sentences of a hard thing are where the real subject usually is. People do not start with it. They circle, they lay groundwork, they say the sayable version first, and then, if the room is still open, they say the other thing.

If the answer arrives before that, the room closes. Kindly. Helpfully. But it closes, and the other thing goes back where it came from.

You are able to leave the room open for two more sentences, and that has never once required you to know what is coming. The written word puts the hearing first and the speaking after rather than running them together, and His Spirit is entirely able to hold a good answer in somebody's mouth for another ten seconds.

The practice is one silence long

Now the practical part, and it is a single thing, and it is harder than it sounds.

In the next real conversation, wait until the other person has completely stopped. Not stopped for breath. Stopped.

There will be a silence. It will feel long. It will be about two seconds and it will feel like eight, and the urge to fill it will be strong, because a silence in a conversation feels like a failure of hospitality to a certain kind of person.

Let it sit. That silence is not empty. It is the space where the other thing comes out, and if you fill it, it does not.

That is the whole practice. One silence. Do not do anything else differently.

You are able to leave two seconds alone, and no conversation has ever been damaged by a pause that a person did not rush to fill. James 1:19 asks for slowness in the speaking rather than cleverness in it. The same Spirit who inspired that line is well able to steady somebody through a silence that feels much longer than it is.