The Nodding

She has a face she does now, and she developed it without ever practicing it, and it works on almost everybody.

It goes like this. She catches about two thirds of what is being said at that end of the table. She fills in the rest from the shape of it, from the faces, from what she knows about the person talking. And when the story reaches whatever the ending is, she does the thing with her eyebrows and the small laugh, and it lands, and the conversation moves on, and nobody has ever once noticed.

The word she cannot manage is names. Names have no context to fill in from. Somebody says a name and she smiles and lets it go, and half an hour later she still does not know who they have been talking about, and she has stopped trying to find out because asking twice about the same person is the kind of thing people remember.

She sits at the end now. She used to sit in the middle.

Nobody has said anything, which she takes as evidence that it is going well, and which might also mean that everybody has quietly adjusted around her the way families do.

There was a wedding in the summer. She spoke to almost nobody, and drove home in a very good mood because she had got through it, and it was only in the car that she noticed she could not tell her husband one thing that anybody had said.

That is you, and the nodding is not the problem you think it is.

Two things I will not move off

The first. Go and get it looked at, if you have not. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Mark 7:34, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

This is not medical advice and I have no idea what is going on in your ears. But if you have been putting it off, and I would put money on it, then hear this plainly: getting it seen is not a lack of faith and never has been. There is no version of trusting God that requires a person to stay uninformed about their own body, and there is nothing in Scripture that treats a practical step as a competitor to prayer. That is not my opinion. Scripture stands behind it in Mark 7:34, and the Holy Spirit brings it near.

The second. I am not going to promise you an outcome.

Not here, not in a song, not in a declaration. Nobody writing to a stranger can promise a pair of ears, and anybody who does has handed out something that was never theirs to give. God may do exactly what you are asking. He may do it another way, or slowly, and He may do something else entirely, and that is His and it will never be a report on you. Scripture holds that ground in Mark 7:34, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a room like this one.

Between those two there is a great deal of room, and everything else here happens inside it.

You are welcome to bring this to God exactly as it is. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth, Psalm 145:18, and in truth is the working phrase, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman stop performing long enough to say the plain thing.

He sighed first

There is a moment in Mark that is worth going slowly over, because of a detail almost everybody reads past.

And looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened.Mark 7:34

The word is sighed.

Before He says anything, He sighs. And whatever that sigh was exactly, it is not the noise of somebody performing a miracle for a crowd. It is the sound a person makes when they have looked at something and felt the weight of it.

And look at what He does before that. He takes the man aside from the crowd. In a story about somebody who cannot hear well, Jesus first removes him from a noisy environment full of people watching, which is the single kindest thing anybody in that story does.

He did not make him manage in the crowd. He took him out of it, and then He sighed, and then He spoke.

You are not a nuisance to God in this. Scripture says he took him aside from the multitude, and looking up to heaven, he sighed, Mark 7:33-34, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries the tone of that into a kitchen where a woman has spent four years being no trouble.

What the nodding is actually costing

Now the honest part, and it is not about ears.

The nodding works. That is the trouble with it. It is a genuinely impressive skill and you have got very good at it, and because it works, nobody has ever had to adjust anything, and because nobody has had to adjust anything, you have been quietly leaving rooms you are still sitting in. This rests on Scripture in Mark 7:34, and on the Holy Spirit who makes what is written a living thing.

Count what has gone. The middle seat. The stories with an ending you actually heard. The names. The wedding, which you attended and did not attend. The follow-up question, which you have stopped asking because a follow-up question about something you did not catch is where the whole thing falls apart. Scripture already said it in Mark 7:34, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

And underneath all of it, one small decision made over and over: that it is better to be quietly absent than to be visibly difficult.

That decision is not humility and it is not thoughtfulness, although it has been wearing both. It is a woman who has decided that her hearing is an imposition, and that idea did not come from Scripture and it did not come from anybody at that table.

You are not an imposition on the people who love you. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and it never once names a hearing as the exception, and the Holy Spirit does not treat a family being asked to speak up as a burden anybody in that family would resent.

The sentence to say at the table

Here is the practical middle, and it is one sentence, and it is not a speech.

I am not hearing very well at that end of the table. Say it to me again.

Not an apology and not an announcement. A fact, and an instruction, given once, out loud, in the room where it applies.

I know why you have not. You have run it through in your head and you can see the pause afterwards, and the face somebody makes, and the way the whole table will speak slightly louder for about four minutes and then forget, and you have decided in advance that the cost of that is higher than the cost of missing everything. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Mark 7:34, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

It is not higher. Four minutes of a family speaking up is nothing. Four years of a woman at the end of a table is not nothing.

You are allowed to take up room in your own family. Scripture says the members should have the same care one for another, and whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it, 1 Corinthians 12:25-26, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gets one plain sentence out of a woman who has been being no trouble since the summer before last.