Slow of Speech

“And Jehovah said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh a man dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? is it not I, Jehovah? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt speak.” — Exodus 4:11-12 (ASV)

If Hyde's story were a legend, he would step off the ship and win the Punjab. He didn't. “At the first,” one early account admits, “John Hyde was not a remarkable missionary.” A colleague who wrote his obituary was blunter. Hyde's first ten years in India “were marked by steady, patient, but not especially fruitful service.”

Part of the reason was Hyde himself. He was hard of hearing, and it got worse over the years; near the end of his life he could rarely hear anything in church. People remembered that “when a question or a remark was directed to him he seemed not to hear, or if he heard he seemed a long time in framing a reply.” His closest friend said Hyde “was not naturally a bright and happy man. On the contrary he was in himself inclined to be morose, retiring, shy and silent.” The one thing everybody noticed was his “wonderful pair of blue eyes.” Picture it: a shy, slightly deaf young man, sent to learn two languages and preach in them to crowds.

Then he got into trouble. New missionaries were supposed to give their first years mainly to language study. Hyde neglected it for Bible study, and the mission committee told him off. His reply was “First things first.” He had come to teach the Bible, he argued, so he needed to know it. The committee had a fair point. A missionary who can't speak the language can't reach anyone. But Hyde didn't drop his language study altogether. He just wouldn't let it crowd out the Scriptures.

For years it looked as if he would never speak well. Then, his colleague wrote, “the baptism of the Spirit and the fire of love loosed his tongue and gave him free utterance.” In the end he preached in Urdu, Punjabi and English. Urdu speakers said he “spoke the language well, if anything a little highflown, using the book-language more than the colloquial.” That is exactly what you'd expect from a man who had learned his Urdu with an Urdu Bible in his hands.

The slow years cost him something else: his colleagues' approval. Many of them didn't like how much time he spent praying. Some thought him impractical, and it was true that he “had not the gifts of an organizer.” Years later a friend asked whether he had known that they disapproved. Hyde smiled: “Oh, yes, I knew it, but they did not understand me, that was all, they never intended to be unkind.” His friend added, “There was not one atom of bitterness as far as I could see.”

In 1901 Hyde went home to America on leave, partly for his health. In September 1902 he sailed back to India as he had left it: faithful, quiet, misunderstood, and with little to show. Nothing in the records of that year suggests the next ten years would be any different. They were.

When Moses complained that he was slow of speech, God didn't deny the problem. He said that he had made Moses' mouth, and promised to be with it. Hyde stayed deaf to the end. God didn't take the weakness away; he worked through it. If you're shy, or you struggle with something that seems to disqualify you, it isn't news to God. And if you've been faithful a long time with not much to show for it, those years may be the soil that everything else grows in.

One thing to do this week: the next time someone misunderstands or criticises you, try reading them the way Hyde read his colleagues: “they did not understand me, that was all, they never intended to be unkind.” Assume the best before you answer, and see what it does to your reply.