I Rehearsed It In The Parking Lot

Sami sits in the parking lot for about four minutes before he goes in. He has done this for years.

In those four minutes he says the sentence. Out loud, sometimes, if the windows are up. He has a version that is polite and a version that is firmer, and he picks one according to how the week has gone.

The sentence, this time, was: Before you do anything, I want a call with the price.

Nine words. He said it four times in the car. He had it.

Then he went in, and the man behind the counter looked up and said, "Morning, what can I do for you?"

And Sami said, "Yeah, hi, it's making a noise, I think when I'm turning maybe, whenever you get a chance, no rush."

And walked out.

Now, I want to look at what actually happened in that room, because it was not a failure of nerve and calling it one has never once helped anybody.

What happened is that the counter had a script running and Sami stepped into it.

What can I do for you is an opening move. It sets a shape: a customer describes a problem, a professional takes it away. And Sami, who is a courteous man, answered the question he was asked instead of saying the thing he came to say, because answering the question you are asked is what a decent person does.

The rehearsed sentence was never a bad sentence. It just had no place to go once somebody else opened the conversation first.

And this is not about being strong enough. Sami manages people at work. He has ended a contract on a phone call. He is not a timid man.

He is a man trying to hold a nine word sentence in his head while an entirely different conversation starts around him, and holding a sentence in your head is exactly the thing that goes first when a room starts moving.

His wife asked when he got home, "Did you tell them to call before they do anything?"

And Sami said, "It's fine, they know."

They do not know. Nobody said it.

The rehearsal was never the weak part

Let me put down what I am not doing, so nothing has to brace.

I am not going to guess at what that noise is. I have not been near the car and it would help nobody. And I am not going to tell you that the man behind the counter was doing anything wrong, because he was not. He said good morning and asked how he could help. That is a person doing his job well.

What I want to look at is the four minutes, and where they went.

Here is one of the most human exchanges in all of Scripture, and it is about exactly this.

And he said, O my Lord, send, I pray thee, by the hand of him whom thou wilt send. And the anger of the LORD was kindled against Moses.Exodus 4:13-14

That comes after several rounds of a man saying he cannot speak. And a few verses earlier, God has already given him the answer, and the answer is not what anybody expects.

Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.Exodus 4:12

I will be with thy mouth.

Not: I will make you eloquent. Not: I will give you confidence. Not: practice it in the parking lot until it is smooth.

He goes to the mouth itself, the specific piece of equipment the man said was the problem, and He says He will be there, in it, at the time.

And notice what that means about the timing. The help is promised for the room, not before it. Moses does not get a rehearsal. He gets company at the moment of speaking.

You are not alone at that counter, and Scripture puts God's help at the mouth in the moment rather than in the preparation beforehand. It is written go and I will be with thy mouth and teach thee what thou shalt say, which locates the help in the speaking itself, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a Tuesday morning at a service desk.

You have been trying to do in a parking lot what God offered to do in the room. Exodus 4 puts the being-with at the point of speech rather than in the practice, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that offer available to a man who has been rehearsing alone for years.

Take the paper in

Here is the practical thing, and it is almost embarrassingly small.

Write the sentence down and take it in with you.

Not memorize it. Take the physical piece of paper into the building, in your hand or in your shirt pocket, and when the man says what can I do for you, look at it, and read it off.

And I know how that sounds. It sounds like something a person should not need to do at forty. Every instinct says a grown man should be able to hold nine words in his head across a doorway.

But look at what the paper actually does.

It takes the sentence out of the part of you that gets overwritten by a room and puts it somewhere a room cannot reach. Paper does not get flustered. Paper does not answer a question it was asked instead of the one it came with. Paper sits there being exactly what it was in the parking lot.

Pilots read checklists out loud in the cockpit. Surgeons do it standing over a patient. Not because they cannot remember. Because a room under pressure is a place where memory is the wrong tool, and everybody who does serious work under pressure worked this out a long time ago.

You have permission to use a written sentence, and no verse anywhere requires a man to carry his words in his head to be honest with them. Exodus 4 has God supplying what a man says rather than demanding he generate it unaided, and the Spirit of God is what makes a piece of paper an act of faith instead of a crutch.

And I want to say the other half, because it is the reason the sentence matters at all.

That sentence is not aggression. Call me before you do anything is the single most normal request in that trade. Every shop expects it. Many prefer it, because a customer who wants a call is a customer who does not argue at the end.

It only feels like a confrontation from the parking lot, at four minutes past nine, in a car, alone.

You were never asking for something unusual, and Scripture puts a plain request among the ordinary dealings between people rather than among the difficult ones. It is written that a soft answer turneth away wrath, which is Proverbs 15 treating ordinary speech as a working tool between people, and His Spirit is what makes nine words at a counter unremarkable rather than confrontational.