I’ve got this habit that I am concerned is a problem. I have actually been working through it to decide if it is just a marginal matter of etiquette or if it is an important matter of gospel consequence. I’ve decided that it is both.
My issue is that I regularly finish other people’s sentences. If you pause…then I march in and finish your thoughts. It’s kind of like I am playing conversational Wheel-of-Fortune and I am trying to solve the puzzle. I shout out the answers, even when it’s not my turn. Somebody needs a buzzer.
This inclination towards sentence hijacking is exacerbated a bit by the fact that I live in the Mid-West. Here people talk a little slower than the Massachusetts cadence I was raised in. And when I say they talk slower I don’t mean that the words are slow in their pronunciation but rather in their articulation. It is not at all uncommon for some people to take a 20-second time out mid-sentence and then finish in a late-round flurry. This is not an excuse, it’s just a context.
So what do I do? If you pause mid-sentence to consider what to say next then I’ll frequently and shamelessly jump on the dangling sentence’s back and ride it on into conversational safety.
Why do I do it? Ostensibly, I am trying to help you out. In reality it may be a bit of frustration and lack of patience. I may be trying to help me out.
A fruit of the Holy Spirit is patience (Gal. 5.22). That is, patience an evidence of gospel grace in my life. If I am talking I am not listening. I am not serving others but myself.
One of the ways in which this has come to the forefront for me is through a recent flurry of really getting it wrong. In other words, I’ll finish their sentence with a completely foreign concept or conclusion.
This is pretty uncomfortable all the way around.
For example, someone might say that this particular situation caused them to feel…and I’ll blurt in: “frustrated!”….only to have them them correct me and finish their sentence with “no, vulnerable”. Maybe I should be quiet and let them go.
Please don’t read me wrong. I am not saying it is sinful to give someone a conversational boost over the various stonewalls in our vocabulary. However, I am saying that if you are regularly taking over sentences then you are probably not being very patient and may just be talking to yourself. This undermines the kind of grace-giving conversations that we as Christians are supposed to have. I’m trying to learn how to do this better.