Quiet Vacation

 Quiet Vacation

I’ve gotten to a place with my latest post-Covid malady that I’ve now lost my voice. It reminds me of the recent Christmas story from the book of Luke, when Zecharias was met by an angel and doubted the angel’s prediction. I am not sure who or where my angel was, but we both ended up with laryngitis. The end of the story for Zecharias is that John the Baptizer was born. I don’t know how he communicated this non-verbally to Elizabeth, and Jane is having trouble understanding as well.

When I broke my knee a few years back, I called the gentleman who sold me disability insurance to replace what most everybody else already has. I told him that since, as a pastor, I couldn’t kneel to pray, that I felt I qualified for disability. He asked if I could still talk to preach. I said “yes” and he said that he didn’t think I was disabled. I thought about calling him again and telling him now I can’t talk in order to preach. He’s retired, but I’m pretty sure he would ask if I could still pray, and when I said “yes,” he would say that he didn’t think I was disabled. But since I can’t preach, I figure Jane and I will just stay in Florida until my voice comes back.

There are some shortcomings to being speechless. It doesn’t stop what goes on in my mind, but the expressing of it is much more difficult. I have learned the husbandly art of mumbling things that I don’t really want Jane to hear, but now she actually can’t hear them.

So when I want to correct her, well, she just misses out on that blessing. And when she’s telling a long story, I don’t interrupt with a different one. And sarcasm is a lot more difficult to express, and a lot less fun, when it is just left to carom around my own head.

And then there’s Calvinism. Yes, that theological belief that things don’t happen by accident, and that somehow, for some reason, me losing my voice on this vacation when it’s just Jane and me in the car or on a long walk is not accident, and that it turns out to be just Jane’s turn to talk and not mine.

You’ve got to be glad for her a little bit, being married to a guy that she has to listen to preach every week at her (and others) and at times actually being part of the sermon herself. Maybe this is part of God’s justice, her turn to talk and not me.

Prov. 17:27 Whoever restrains his words has knowledge, and he who has a cool spirit is a man of understanding. 28 Even a fool who keeps silent is considered wise; when he closes his lips, he is deemed intelligent.