I Don’t Fight for the Mic
The first time I heard the still small voice, I was at the foot of a toilet, my cheek resting on the cool tile floor. It was minutes after I learned my husband was leaving me to build a future with someone else. My body had reacted before my brain could process the betrayal; I ran to the bathroom and found I couldn’t leave.
The porcelain bowl became an ironic anchor, a symbol of what my life had become. Yet, under the quiet roar of the bathroom fan, even though I didn’t recognize it, I heard God’s voice distinctly for the first time. It wasn’t a shout; it was a warmth that surged through my body, even through the cold tile, a clear, quiet thought that I was worthy, valued, and loved, exactly as I was.
As the youngest sibling with boisterous older voices around me, I spent my childhood fighting to be heard. At the dinner table, in the car, in the living room, conversation felt like a competition for oxygen. If it came to brute strength, I lost every competition. My brother and sister could easily grind me into submission. I was smaller, weaker, and not hyper-competitive by nature. If the spotlight of attention ever landed on me, hesitation meant the moment passed. If I softened, I disappeared.
I came into my voice during my high school days when my brother and sister had already left for college and I was finally able to claim some of my parent’s attention. In the age of feminism, I was encouraged to have a voice. Disappearing was framed as the worst fate for a woman—a loss of all the progress made by the generations that came before us. I should claim space; never shrink. I learned to use my voice and fill the space. But no one really explained to me what to do once I held the microphone.
I am a Public Speaking teacher and have been a minister for two decades, yet I have never felt that I mastered the art of communication. Human dynamics are constantly shifting. The ground beneath us moves, leaving us unsteady and second-guessing ourselves when we choose to speak. What is bold in one moment becomes reckless in another. What feels like courage can tip into self-importance before we even register the shift. I have dedicated my life to communication as both an educator and writer, and yet I am humbled by the organic nature of communication, where there are no assurances you will be heard or received with good grace.
It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear foolish than to open it and remove all doubt.
—Mark Twain
The line is funny because it is true, and we’ve all been there. The words come out before we fully think them through and the results can be humiliating and possibly hurtful. Words can clarify, but they can also expose our deepest insecurities, opening a gateway to the worst in us. They can defend truth, but they can just as easily feed ego.
For women, and especially Christian women, the tension around voice is complicated. We have often been characterized as gossips, disruptors, and schemers, even when men engage in the same behavior.
Scripture has at times been used to quiet us before we even have a chance to speak. Verses like 1 Corinthians 14:34 have been cited as justification: “Women should remain silent in the churches...”
I have spent years carrying the Greek of these passages like a heavy stone up a steep cliff trying to build a bridge between the chaotic assemblies of Corinth and the fire for ministry God planted in my bones. I wrestled with the word hesychia. Where in the American church, the scripture had been translated as a corrective toward women, in Greek, it felt freeing—no longer tied with such finality to the word silence. “Settledness” or a “quietness of spirit” were stronger, more nuanced translations. Even in my early seminary years, I sensed Paul’s stress as he tried to manage the unstructured setting of the Corinthian church. He was begging congregants to choose peace, order, and stillness over chaos.
Yet this passage has been used by many in the church as a physical gag order. It is a strange stewardship indeed to gift a woman with an M.Div. and twenty years of vocational wisdom, only to suggest that her greatest spiritual contribution is her silence. Yet this is exactly what many Christians, both men and women, practice in churches across the globe.
To treat Paul’s address to a turbulent, uneducated assembly as a permanent muzzle on the modern woman is not just a failure of history; it is a failure of logic. There is a profound dissonance here that educated women feel in their very marrow. I have spent years disciplining and educating myself, yet am I expected to shut my mouth when it comes to the most important spiritual aspects of my existence? We preach a Gospel that breaks chains, yet we often use the letters of the Apostles to forge new ones, ushering good people out of the church forever.
My recent embrace of silence, however, is not a concession to those who would muzzle me. It is a reclamation.
Debby Handman is a former minister (M.Div), educator, and single mother writing from the misty crossroads of faith and survival in rural Oregon. She is the author of the acclaimed novels House on Sand and The Gambler’s Wife, and her upcoming release, House of Broken Vessels.
