The First Three Seconds of a Room

You have already tried being calmer.

I want to start there, because most articles about hurry assume the reader has not thought about this, and you have. You have thought about it a great deal. You have decided to slow down more times than you can count, usually late at night, usually with total sincerity.

And it lasted about a day and a half, because being calmer is not a thing a person can do. It is a description of a result, not an action, and you cannot execute a description.

So here is something the size of an actual action.

Three seconds.

When you walk into a room, stand still for three seconds before you say anything.

That is the whole article, and I am aware of how small it sounds, so let me spend the rest of this telling you why three seconds is not a trick and why it does something that a resolution cannot.

What a room does in three seconds

A room reads an arrival faster than anybody can think.

That is not a poetic claim, it is how people work. Long before anybody has processed a word, everybody present has taken in speed, posture, volume, where the eyes went and how the hands moved, and the room has adjusted itself to match. All of it happens in about the time it takes to cross a threshold.

Which means the first three seconds are not a small part of an arrival. They are the arrival. Everything after that is people acting on a conclusion they have already reached.

And here is the part that should be encouraging rather than alarming: three seconds is a very short thing to change. It is much shorter than an evening, and immeasurably shorter than a personality.

You are able to change three seconds, and it has never once required you to become a calmer sort of person first. John 20:19 records an arrival where the first thing that happened was somebody standing still, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a small physical act carry more than a large intention.

He came and stood

Here is the arrival I want to show you, and I want you to notice the verb before the words.

...when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, came Jesus and stood in the midst, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you. (John 20:19, King James Version)

Came, and stood, and then said.

Three movements and they are in that order. He did not come in talking. He did not move through the room greeting people. He arrived, He stopped, He was in the middle of them and standing, and only after that did anything get said.

And the room He walked into was the most frightened room in the New Testament. Locked doors, a group of people who had watched everything go wrong three days earlier, nobody sleeping.

If any arrival ever had a reason to lead with words, it was that one. There was so much to say and all of it was good news.

He stood first.

You are looking at the pattern for an arrival, and it has never once begun with the thing a person came in to say. John 20:19 puts the standing between the coming and the speaking rather than running them together. The Spirit of God is the one who can slow a good and urgent thing down by exactly one beat.

I want to add the thing that makes this reasonable rather than mystical, because a family friendly faith has to be able to explain itself. Bodies lead and words follow. Everyone knows this from the other side: a person can tell within a second of somebody walking in whether the news is good, and not one word has been spoken. We read arrivals for a living, all of us, all day.

You are being asked for a body rather than a mood, and no arrival has ever depended on how a person happened to be feeling. The written word records a posture before it records a sentence, and His Spirit is entirely able to work through something as ordinary as a pair of feet not moving.

Three seconds is the right size

Now let me defend the number, because a small number invites suspicion.

Three seconds works precisely because it is too short to fail at. A minute is a commitment. Three seconds is over before the part of you that argues has finished loading its first objection.

It also does not require anybody else to notice, and that matters more than it sounds. Every larger attempt at this involves the room, and the moment the room is involved a person gets self conscious and performs calm instead of being still, and performed calm is worse than honest hurry.

Three seconds is invisible. Nobody will ask what is going on. Stand in the doorway, look at who is there, and then speak.

And what changes is not what you say. It is that you now know who is in the room before you talk to them, which sounds obvious and is not, because a person arriving at speed genuinely does not.

You are able to see a room before you speak into it, and it has never once been possible to do both at the same time. John 20:19 has the standing come first and the peace come after. The same Spirit who was in that locked room is well able to hold somebody in a doorway for three seconds.