Unspeakable

Being silent is hard for me. Really hard. I am a people person. I like to connect with new people. I am a church planter, so talking to other people is a pretty vital part of my job. So going for three weeks without speaking at all was a huge blow to me.

Here's the story. In June of last year, I began to experience some hoarseness in my voice. I do speak for a half hour to forty-five minutes every week, so, being hoarse is not something out of the ordinary. However, I put my voice under some additonal strain by doing some singing and preaching. I was also under the stress of getting ready to start planting The Crossroads. Stress causes tightness in the throat, so that created more strain.

I didn't worry about it at first, but a week turned into a month turned into three months. I began to suspect that I probably had a cyst on one of my vocal cords. The same thing had happened four years earlier, and I was pretty sure it felt the same. The solution the previous time had been surgery to remove the cyst, but I was not too anxious to have another surgery. The surgery is quick (like 10 minutes) and simple (if there is such a thing when it comes to surgery), but there is a risk with surgery that I would be left permanently hoarse (not good).

So, I was reluctant to go to the doctor, as in I didn't go to the doctor until December. The doctor confirmed my suspicions and gave me two options: repeat the surgery with the aforementioned risk or go on complete vocal rest for three weeks. I reluctantly chose option B. My enforced silence started the week after Christmas and went halfway through the month of January.

Tough, really tough, and frustrating. Tough trying to communicate everything imperfectly through hand signals, grunts, facial expressions, and writing on a marker board. Tough not being able to join in conversations. Tough not being able to give instruction and direction (being a type A personality). Tough and frustrating being misunderstood, misinterpreted, and "misquoted" even by people who love and care for you. It was so refreshing when someone "got" what I was trying to say and so frustrating when I just had to give up trying to communicate because the conversation had already moved on before I could get out what I was wanting to say or because other people simply could not understand me.

I have been asked by a lot of people what God told me during that time, and here's what I got. One of the weeks of my silence covered a week when we were on a mission trip to Mexico delivering blankets, stuffed animals, and Spanish gospels. Being in a vanload of your friends for a twelve hour drive, going into Mexico as one of the few Spanish speakers, and not being able to talk, that was sheer misery.

The trip was phenomenal, as it always is. The first day in Mexico, I did what I always do. I cried. We took about 700 blankets into a little fishing village on the Gulf Coast. As we distributed them, I came face to face with the reality that always hits me: "It's not enough!" There are so many millions of people who need to know about Christ. There are so many hurting, hungry, cold, impoverished people. We as Americans are so blessed. And it's not enough. For the 700 people whose lives we blessed and with whom we were able to share something of Christ's message, there are millions more who need to feel his love and hear his message. It's just not enough.

Okay, okay. So, here's what I learned. The church is the body of Christ, and the vocal cords are getting strained. For too long we have relied on "career missionaries" to get the job done. We send them money every once in a while, we pray for them, we may send them cards and letters. But we have placed the full responsibility of taking the gospel to the ends of the earth on a tiny segment of the church. As a result, the voice of the church is often silenced, and maybe it has even become sick.

How can you see this? USAmerica is now the third largest mission field in the world. Our voice has been silenced even on our "home court." Our voice is no longer being heard. We do not have the strength to proclaim to the world, much less our own nation, the message of Jesus Christ. Why? In part because we have relied almost exclusively on the vocal cords of the church (missionaries, pastors, evangelists) to communicate the message. And that's not the way God designed the body.

You see, there is far more to communication than just the vocal cords. I learned from my doctor that I have to take better care of my voice by doing more than just pushing my vocal cords harder. Effective speach requires much more of the body. Good projection depends on the abdominal muscles, the lungs, lung capacity, breathing techniques, the mouth, the tongue, even what you eat or drink and when you eat or drink. Effective communication also requires more than just the voice. Facial expressions, eye contact, hand gestures, tone of voice, choice of words, all of these things are vital for effective communication. In short, the whole body must be involved to effectively communicate.

We need the whole body of Christ to be involved in sharing the message of Christ if we ever hope to "do enough" to reach the world for Christ. We need everyone to be involved at home and around the world in loving people, touching people, and sharing God's message with other people. I wonder if God sometimes feels frustrated that he has the most incredible message in the world for the world, but his voice is weak because his people are not carrying that message to all the world.

In Christ, we have been given "unspeakable joy" (1 Pet. 3:8), but that doesn't mean we don't speak about it.