The Apology In Front Of It

Marnie has a little run-up now, and she has been doing it for so long that she cannot remember speaking without one.

It is about four words. It changes slightly depending on the room. Sorry, but. I know I always. Do not get me started on. You will have to forgive me.

Every one of them does the same job, which is to hand the other person permission to be tired of her before she has said anything.

She heard herself do it in her own kitchen last month, to her own granddaughter, who is nineteen and who had asked her a direct question and was sitting there waiting for an answer with genuine interest on her face.

And Marnie said do not get me started and then answered the question.

The girl did not notice. Why would she. It is a completely normal thing to say and half the country says it.

Marnie noticed, and she has been thinking about it ever since, because she can date roughly when it started and it was not with her granddaughter and it was not in that kitchen.

Here is the thing about the little preface, and it is worth being clear about it.

It does not protect her. It never has. Its actual function is to get in first: to say the critical thing about herself before anybody else can, so that if the room is tired of her she has already agreed with them and cannot be caught out.

That is what it is for. And it costs almost nothing each time, and she has been paying it several times a week for about fifteen years.

You have your own. There is a small thing you say just before you say the thing, and it is so habitual now that it has stopped being a sentence and become a throat-clearing.

Nobody here is going to tell you that you have been dishonest. You have not.

But there is a psalm with an instruction in it that has nothing in front of it, and the plainness is the point.

The instruction has no preface and that is deliberate

There is a line at the start of Psalm 107 that is one of the plainest instructions in the whole book.

Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy.Psalm 107:2

Say so.

That is the whole instruction. Two words. There is no qualifier in front of it, no guidance about tone, no caution about frequency, no suggestion that the saying should be softened for the room or preceded by anything at all.

And notice who is addressed. Not the eloquent. Not the trained. The redeemed, which is to say anybody it happened to, and the reason given is simply that it happened.

The verse does not even say the redeemed should say it well. It says say so.

And you are permitted to speak plainly about it. That is not my encouragement: the written word issues that as a bare instruction with nothing attached to the front of it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who has heard herself apologize to her own granddaughter.

And the thing that happened to you is the whole qualification. The word makes redemption the credential in that sentence, and the Spirit is the one who bears witness with your spirit that it is yours, which means nothing else has ever been required to earn the right to mention it.

Where the preface came from

It came from somewhere. They always do.

Marnie can trace hers to a stretch of about two years in her forties when she was, by her own account, a good deal to be around. She was newly and enormously glad about something and she talked about it constantly and she was not always reading the room well, and one or two people were short with her and she felt it.

She adjusted, which was right.

But the adjustment did not stop when the two years did. The volume came down, appropriately, and then the preface arrived to make sure it stayed down, and the preface has now outlived by thirteen years the situation that produced it.

That is the ordinary shape of these things. A correction that was accurate for one season becomes a permanent setting, and nobody ever comes and tells you the season has ended.

And you are not the woman you were in that stretch. The word says if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature, and old things are passed away, and the passing away is stated as an accomplished thing rather than a project, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true about somebody's habits and not only their standing.

And nothing is being held against you from those two years. The word says as far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us, and the removing is His action and it is complete, and the Spirit is the one who lets a person stop apologizing in advance for a stretch that has already been dealt with.

What to do about a throat-clearing

Now, practically, because you cannot simply decide to stop doing a thing you do not notice yourself doing.

I am not going to tell you to catch it every time. You will not, and trying will make you self-conscious in exactly the way that makes people harder to talk to.

And I am not going to give you a replacement phrase, because that would be a script and this site does not hand out scripts. A woman with a new line to remember is not free, she is performing a different thing.

What is available is smaller. You can know what it is. That is all, and it is enough to start with, because a habit that has been invisible for fifteen years behaves differently once it has been seen even once.

And you are not required to fix this to be acceptable. Nothing in Scripture makes your welcome depend on how you introduce a subject, and the Spirit of God has never once assessed anybody by their conversational openings.