I Have Started Holding It In

She has been the loud one in every room she has ever been in, and for thirty five years that was simply a fact about her, like her height.

Her mother was the same. Her grandmother, from what everybody says, was worse. When something moves in her it comes out, audibly and visibly, and it always has, and she has never once had to work at it.

Then, about a year ago, she read something and it lodged. She cannot even find the sentence now. What it left behind was a question she cannot put down: how would she know, from the inside, whether what she does is response or habit? And a second one behind it, worse: has she been the reason the room does what it does?

So she has started holding it in.

Nobody has noticed, or if they have they have not said. She sits, she keeps her hands in her lap, she lets somebody else be the first voice, and afterward she goes out to her car feeling that she has been careful and disciplined and honest.

And on the drive home the thing she cannot get past is this: she was watching herself all evening. She was aware of every hand she did not raise. Whatever that was, it was not less self conscious than the loud version. It was more.

If you have started holding it in, come in and get a plate. Nobody expressive is going to be mocked on this page.

Withholding is the same job in reverse

Let us look squarely at the swap she made, because it felt like repentance and it was not.

The loud version had her managing the room. The quiet version has her managing herself, in detail, for ninety minutes, with a running commentary. Both of them keep her attention pinned on what she is doing and how it is landing. Neither of them is what she is actually after.

And there is a cost she has not counted. Something in that room was carried by her being the first voice, and she has withdrawn it as a private discipline without telling anybody, and the room does not know why it has got quieter.

You have not become honest by going quiet. Nothing about sitting on your hands has ever made you less watched by yourself. I am not saying it to send a woman back to being loud. Scripture says the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets (1 Corinthians 14:32), which puts the control in the hands of the person without ever declaring which way the control should be exercised, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman on the drive home.

Control is given, and the direction is not prescribed

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off anybody expressive.

Read what the verse settles and, more importantly, what it deliberately leaves open.

And the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets.1 Corinthians 14:32

Subject to the prophets. That is a statement about capacity: nobody in that room is overwhelmed, nobody is a passenger, everybody present can choose. It is the answer to the fear that a person carried away is not in charge of themselves.

What it does not say is which direction the choosing should go. It does not say the mature choice is always to hold back, and it does not say the faithful choice is always to let it out. It hands a person the reins and declines to tell them which way to steer.

You have the reins and no rule about the direction, and Scripture states the capacity without prescribing the use of it. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings it to a woman with her hands in her lap.

Nothing here says quiet is holier

Something must be said very plainly, because half the rooms in this family have got this wrong for a century in one direction and the other half in the other.

Restraint is not maturity. The people in that room who weep and shout are not immature versions of the people who do not, and a woman who has been loud since she was a child is not thereby suspect. If anything, the trap she has walked into is the more fashionable one, and it wears the clothes of humility, which is why nobody warned her about it.

And the performance trap itself is not her invention. It is this family's own besetting failure, in both directions, and she caught it the way everybody catches it.

What He gave you is not a demonstration. You have nothing to prove in that room. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the aim is the good of the room rather than the standing of the one it came through, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a woman's volume in either direction, who does the work in a meeting.

And if this year has cost more than the people in that front room know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday has started to frighten you, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.