The Speech You Rehearsed

He wrote it in the field.

That’s the part I want you to see before we look at what he wrote. He didn’t come up with it on the road and he didn’t improvise it at the door. He composed it standing in a pig field in a foreign country, hungry, alone, with nobody around to tell him whether any of it was true.

I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.

Three parts. Look at them separately, because they are not the same kind of sentence and only one of them is a problem.

Part one is true. I have sinned against heaven and against you. That’s accurate. He did. He took the money and he burned it. No argument.

Part two is a feeling reported as a fact. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Notice he doesn’t say he feels unworthy. He states it as a settled condition, the way you’d report the weather.

Part three is where it goes wrong. Make me like one of your hired servants.

That’s not a confession. That’s a proposal.

He has drafted terms.

I’ve watched people do this for twenty-five years and I did it myself, and it took me a long time to understand what’s actually happening in that third line, because on the surface it looks like the most humble thing in the story.

It isn’t humility. It’s a hedge.

Here’s the mechanism. If he walks up that road with no proposal, he is at his father’s mercy, completely, with no idea what’s coming. That is unbearable. So he does the thing people do when they can’t stand the not knowing.

He sets his own price low enough that he cannot be rejected.

If he asks to be a son and gets turned down, that’s the end of him. If he asks to be a hired hand, the worst case is he gets sent away from a job he never had, which he can survive. He has taken the outcome he cannot bear and made it impossible, by pre-rejecting himself before anyone else can do it.

That’s not surrender. That’s negotiation. It’s a man protecting himself in the only way he has left, and I have nothing but sympathy for it, because it’s exactly what I’d do and it’s exactly what you’ve done.

You’ve written this speech. You may not have said it out loud, but it’s drafted, and you could recite it right now if I asked.

I’m not going to be one of those people who has it all together. I’ll come sit in the back. I’m not looking to get involved in anything. I don’t have anything to offer anybody at this point in my life. I just want to be all right with God, that’s all.

That’s the speech. Every one of those sentences is a negotiated demotion, and every one of them sounds like modesty.

Now I’m going to say the hard part, and I’m going to say it as someone who has run this play myself, so take it the way it’s meant.

The rehearsed speech is a way to stay in control of a situation you have already decided will not go well.

If you set the terms yourself, you never have to find out what the terms would have been.

That’s the payoff. Not humility. Certainty. You’d rather have a small certain thing than an unknown large one, because the unknown large one requires you to be hopeful in front of witnesses, and you have decided you are done being hopeful in front of witnesses.

I understand that. I’ve been there and I’d rather not talk you out of a defense that has probably been protecting you for a long time.

But I need you to see it clearly. It’s a defense. It is not the truth about you, it’s not modesty, and it is not what the story calls it either.

Because here’s what actually happens to that speech, and we’ll spend the next chapter on it in detail.

The offer never lands.

He gets through part one and part two, and then the father starts calling for a robe.

The terms he drafted out there in that field are never taken up. The whole negotiation, the entire careful hedge, the thing he built to protect himself from the answer he was afraid of, is simply not received. It doesn’t get rejected. It doesn’t get argued with. It doesn’t get answered at all.

Nobody ever tells him his offer is unacceptable. It just never becomes a subject.

That is a stranger and better outcome than being told no, and it’s a stranger and better outcome than being told yes.

I want to be honest with you about something in my own version of this, because it’s relevant and because I said I’d be straight with you.

When I left in 2006, I did not write a humble speech. I wrote the opposite one.

Mine went: I don’t need any of this. I’m done. I have other options and I’m going to use them. And I did have other options, and I did use them, and it worked out fine on paper.

But it was the same move. It was a set of terms drafted in advance to make sure I never had to stand in front of anybody and find out what would happen. His version protected him by going small. Mine protected me by going hard. Both of us were doing the same thing, which is deciding the outcome ourselves so we’d never have to receive one.

I’m telling you that so you know the speech has more than one form. If yours doesn’t sound humble, don’t assume you haven’t written one. Anger writes them too. So does independence. So does I’m just a private person about my faith.

Any sentence that settles the question before you get to the door is the speech.

Here’s your move, and this one might take you twenty minutes.

Write your speech down. Word for word, in first person, exactly as you’d say it.

Start it with: If I came back, here’s what I’d want understood up front. Then let it run. Don’t clean it up and don’t make it sound better than it is. Nobody’s reading it.

When you’re done, go back through and underline every place you set a limit. Every I’m not going to, every I just want, every all I’m asking for, every don’t expect me to.

Those underlined phrases are your hired-hand line. That’s the demotion you’re proposing.

Now look at the whole thing and answer one question, honestly, just for yourself:

Am I offering these terms because I believe they’re true, or because I can survive them if they’re refused?

You already know the answer. You’ve known it since the second paragraph of this chapter.

I’m not going to tell you the terms are wrong. Not yet. We haven’t gotten to the part where anybody responds, and there’s no point arguing with a man about his price before he’s met the buyer.

Just have it written down.

Because in the next chapter he starts up that road with the whole thing memorized, and he can see the house, and he’s got maybe half a mile to go, and something happens that he did not plan for and could not have planned for.

He’s still a long way off.

Somebody’s already coming.