I Do Not Have The Words For It Here

She can do the pharmacy now. That took eight months and she is quietly proud of it.

She can do the school office, and the bus, and the bit at the doctor where they ask you to describe the pain, which she practiced on the walk there four times and got through without the woman switching to the slow voice, which is a thing people do without knowing they are doing it and which she has decided not to mind.

She can order anything. She can complain about a delivery. She had a genuinely funny conversation with a man at the market about a mango three weeks ago and she thought about it for two days afterwards because it was the first time she had made somebody laugh here on purpose.

She is thirty-one. She has been in this country two years and four months.

And she cannot ask about this.

Not because the words do not exist. She has looked them up. She has the phrase, and she has written it out, and she has said it to herself in the bathroom with the door shut and it comes out fine.

It is the second sentence.

Because whoever she says it to is going to say something back, and it will not be the sentence she prepared for, and it will have a word in it she does not know, and then she will be standing in front of somebody about the most important thing in her life with the specific hot silence she knows better than she knows anything else in this country.

So she has not asked. Two years and four months, and she has thought about it hundreds of times, and every single time she gets as far as the second sentence.

Nothing here is waiting on your vocabulary

I want to say something about the eight months and the pharmacy before anything else, because I do not think anybody in this country has ever congratulated you properly.

You have built a working life in a second language in two years and four months. You have learned the school office, the bus, the doctor, the market. You have made a stranger laugh on purpose about a mango.

That is not a woman who cannot manage. That is one of the harder things a person can do and you have done most of it, alone, while also living.

So let us be exact about what the difficulty actually is, because it is not what it looks like.

It is not vocabulary. You have the phrase. It is the fear of the hot silence in the second sentence, which is not a language problem at all. It is what happens when a person has been made to feel small in a room enough times, and it would be the same fear in your first language if the stakes were high enough.

Now here is where you actually stand while you are standing in that bathroom with the door shut.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Read the two words Paul removes and then the two he puts in their place.

Strangers and foreigners. Those are the legal categories of that world: the one who does not belong here, and the one who is here on somebody else's permission. They are precisely the two things you have been for two years and four months in every office and on every bus.

And he says: no more. And what replaces them is fellowcitizens, which is a status word, and of the household of God, which is a family word, and neither of them has ever required a language test.

You are a fellow citizen and a member of the household, and you were on the day you arrived, and that is not encouragement for a woman who is doing well at the pharmacy, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the second sentence rather than on a verse you may well know better in your own language.

Now let me say something about the hot silence.

You know it better than you know anything else in this country. That is a devastating line and I want it left standing rather than smoothed over.

But notice where it does not exist. It does not exist in the bathroom with the door shut, where the phrase comes out fine. It does not exist when you pray, whatever language that happens in, and I would guess it happens in the first one. And it has never once existed between you and God, in either language, in two years and four months.

You have never had to prepare a first sentence for Him. Scripture says you are of the household, and a household is the one place where nobody speaks carefully, and the Spirit of God has been in you through every one of those hundreds of times you got as far as the second sentence.

And here is the practical part, and it is short, and then I stop.

Ask in writing.

That is all. The thing that undoes you is the live exchange, not the request, and a message or a note removes the entire mechanism of the fear: you can write it, and read it back, and look up any word that comes in the reply, and take an hour over it if you want to.

I am not going to tell you who to write to, because I do not know your city or your street or who is in them. One person. In writing. That is the whole of the advice and it is deliberately small.

You are not held up by a language. The word says no more strangers and no more foreigners, and the Spirit is the seal on it, and the household you are already in has never once been waiting on your second sentence.

You are a fellow citizen and one of the household, and you were on the day you got off the plane. Scripture removes the two legal words for not belonging and puts a family word in their place, and the Holy Spirit has been in you through hundreds of second sentences.