The Room Has Already Decided

You can feel it in the first ninety seconds and there is nothing you can do with the information.

She has taught in a great many rooms and she knows the difference. There is a room that has not thought about a thing, and that room is open and slightly bored and easy to work with. There is a room that disagrees, and that room is alert and asking questions in its head and is, honestly, her favorite kind.

And then there is this one. A room that decided some time ago, before she arrived, probably before she was invited, and that has come to be pleasant about it.

They are lovely. They laugh in the right places. Somebody will thank her afterwards and mean it. And there is a settled thing under the surface that her material is going to slide off, and she has known that since about minute two of the first session, and there are five sessions left.

Here is what has been happening to her in response, and it is why this is costing her more than a hostile room would.

She has started to get clever.

Not dishonest. She has not changed a single thing she believes and she has not softened one point. But she has begun, over three sessions, to construct approaches. To find better angles. To think in the car about what would get underneath it, what illustration might do the work an argument will not, what order might catch them before they have raised the shutters.

And on the way home last week she recognized what she was doing, and it made her feel slightly sick, because she has watched other people do exactly this and she knows what it is called from the outside.

It is not teaching any more. It is strategy. She has become a woman trying to get past somebody's defenses with technique, and she does not want to be that, and she cannot see what else there is to do with a room that made its mind up in advance.

What Paul says he refused to use

There is a passage where Paul describes his own manner of speaking to a city that was famous for admiring clever speakers, and what he says is startling.

And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power.1 Corinthians 2:3-4

Enticing words. The phrase means persuasive speech, the art of it, the craft that gets a proposition inside somebody's guard.

And Paul, who was capable of it and who could out argue almost anybody in that world, says he did not use it. Not that it failed. That he set it down.

And notice what he puts in its place. Not a better technique. A demonstration of the Spirit and of power, which is a thing he does not control and cannot schedule.

So hear this, driving home from session three: the getting past their defenses was never your assignment. That is not my relief for you; it is what His word says a man deliberately declined to attempt, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a refusal like that and makes it breathable for a woman who has been building approaches in her car.

Now let me name what has actually been costing you, because it is not the room.

It is the drift. Three sessions ago you were teaching, and now you are engineering, and you felt the change and you were right to feel it. That instinct on the way home was not scrupulosity. It was accurate.

And here is why it happened, and it is worth knowing, because it will happen again in another room in another year. A settled position produces a specific kind of pressure. It says: nothing you say will land, so the ordinary means are not working, so you had better find extraordinary ones. And a conscientious teacher hears that as a call to work harder, and working harder in that situation means getting cleverer, because there is nothing else left to increase.

You have been responding faithfully to a demand that was never issued to you.

The persuading is not yours. Scripture puts the demonstration in the Spirit and never once in the ingenuity of the one at the front, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the back of that classroom waiting to see whether you can find the right angle.

And I am not going to tell you to keep teaching it or to stop. Two sessions or five, your call, and there is nothing in this that makes stepping back a failure of nerve.

What I am handing you is what Paul handed himself: permission to say the true thing plainly, without craft, into a room that has decided, and to leave the result somewhere it has always belonged.

One more thing, because you should hear it. The room being pleasant is not a rejection of you. They like you. Somebody will thank you and mean it. Settled positions are held by people who are, in every other respect, entirely warm, and you have been reading their warmth as a kind of insulation when it is simply warmth.