The Script You Wrote For Yourself

Sorcha has about nine lines now, and she did not get any of them from a book.

She built them herself, over roughly a decade, out of things that went well. A phrase that landed once. A way of opening that did not make anybody's shoulders go up. A particular self-deprecating aside that reliably buys her another minute.

None of it is dishonest. That is worth saying plainly, because a reader might assume there is a manipulation in here and there is not. Every one of those lines is something she genuinely thinks, and she uses them because they work, and working means the other person stays in the conversation.

So she has, without ever calling it this, written herself a script.

She noticed at a doorstep in February. She was standing in somebody's hall, being handed a towel, and she heard line four come out of her mouth in response to a question she had not been asked, and she stopped mid-sentence and lost her thread completely and had to laugh and start again.

The woman thought she had forgotten what she was saying.

What had actually happened is that she had heard herself perform, in a hallway, to somebody who had already pulled her in out of the rain and put the kettle on.

And here is what has bothered her since. The script is not for hostile rooms. She would understand that. She could defend that.

It comes out everywhere now. It came out in that hallway, with a woman who was delighted to see her.

You have your own version. There are phrases you use, and you built them yourself out of the ones that worked, and they have stopped being tools and become the way you talk.

Nobody here is going to hand you a better script. That is the one thing this article will not do, and I want that clear from the start.

The instruction is about seasoning, and seasoning is not a recipe

There is a line in Colossians that is the closest the New Testament comes to advice about how to speak, and the metaphor in it is the whole point.

Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.Colossians 4:6

Seasoned with salt.

Notice what that is not. It is not a recipe. It is not a list of things to say, and it is conspicuously not a form of words: Paul, who was perfectly capable of writing out instructions when he wanted to, gives a quality rather than a content.

Salt does not replace the food. It is not a substitute for having anything to say. It brings out what is already there, and the amount depends entirely on the dish, which is why nobody can write it down for you.

And then the reason given: that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. Every man. Which is to say, differently, because they are different, which is exactly what a fixed script cannot do.

And you are not being handed a better set of lines. That is not my refusal being clever: the written word gives a seasoning rather than a script in the one place it could easily have given a script, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that land in a woman who lost her thread in a hallway.

And you already have what a fixed script was standing in for. The word says the Spirit of truth is given to lead into all truth, and the leading happens in the moment rather than in advance, and He is the one who supplies the answer for every man rather than one answer for all of them.

What the script was actually protecting

Here is the part that matters more than the lines.

Sorcha built the script out of successes, which sounds sensible and is the trap. A line that worked once gets kept. A line that produced a flinch gets dropped. Over ten years that process does not produce a better speaker; it produces a person whose speech has been optimized for one outcome, and the outcome is not being too much.

Which means every line in that script is, underneath, the same line. They all say: I know, I will not go on.

And she now says that to people who have not asked her to stop. She said it to a woman with a towel.

And you are not too much. The word says we are His workmanship, and the making is His, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit about what you are, which settles the question the script has been answering nine different ways for a decade.

And the fear it was built from is not from Him. The word says God hath not given us the spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind, and hath not given rules out the source rather than merely disapproving of the feeling, and the Spirit is the one who makes that distinction hold in a body.

Nobody is telling you to speak without thinking

I want to be careful here, because a message like this can easily read as permission to be careless, and careless is not free, it is just careless.

Thinking about how you say things is not the problem. Sorcha reads people well and that is a gift and the world is better for it.

And I am not going to tell you which of the nine to drop. I do not know your rooms. Some of those lines are probably genuinely good and you should keep them for the rest of your life.

The only thing on offer tonight is that you know where they came from. Not a book, not a course, not a wise person. You built them, out of a decade of watching what did not cost you anything, and that means you can hold them more lightly than you have been.

And nothing about your welcome depends on getting the words right. Nothing in Scripture makes anybody's acceptance contingent on their delivery, and the Spirit of God has never once assessed a person by their opening line.