Reading Out Loud To Grown People

You have nearly read a paragraph out loud to somebody four times this month and you have not done it once.

Every time it goes the same way. Something in the book is genuinely good, and the impulse arrives to say it out loud to whoever is in the room, and then a second thought lands on top of it. Grown people do not get read to. It would be a strange thing to start doing, and there is no natural way to begin.

So you say something about it instead. You describe the paragraph rather than reading it, which takes about the same amount of time and does none of the same thing.

Two things are not coming here, and you have met them both.

Nobody is handing you a list. Not a title, not an author, not a genre, and no shelf of what anybody ought to have read by now. Being handed one has never once opened a book.

And nobody is saying one word about your phone. You know about the phone. Everybody knows. Being told again by a stranger returns nothing at all.

What I want to look at is the second thought, because it presents as good manners and it is a very recent invention.

Reading out loud to adults was the ordinary way things were read for most of history, and Scripture has an instruction about it.

Cause that it be read also

There is a line at the end of Colossians where Paul gives an instruction about a letter, and the instruction assumes something that has almost disappeared.

And when this epistle is read among you, cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans. (Colossians 4:16, King James Version)

Read the assumption underneath it.

When this epistle is read among you. Not once everybody has read it privately. When it is read among you, which is one voice and a room of people listening, and Paul does not explain that arrangement or defend it, because it was simply how a letter got read.

And then the instruction: cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans. Do it again, in another room, to another set of grown people.

Nobody in that sentence is a child. Nobody is being read to because they cannot read. A room of adults is being read to because that is what you do with something worth hearing.

You are asking permission for the ordinary thing, and reading aloud to adults has never once been a strange thing to do. Colossians 4:16 assumes one voice and a room of grown people without defending the arrangement at all, and the Holy Spirit is the one saying that over four unread paragraphs this month.

There is one more word in it and it is stronger than people notice.

Cause that it be read. Make it happen. That is not a suggestion that it would be nice if somebody got round to it. Paul instructs somebody to arrange it, which means the reading aloud was worth an instruction of its own.

You have a thing worth arranging on purpose, and one paragraph said out loud has never once needed a natural opening to be worth doing. It is written cause that it be read also in the church of the Laodiceans, the arranging is instructed rather than hoped for, and the Spirit of God is saying that plainly here.

Describing it is a different thing entirely

Here is the mechanism, and it is worth being exact because the substitute looks so reasonable.

Describing a paragraph and reading a paragraph are two different acts and only one of them does the thing.

When you describe it, you hand somebody your summary. They get the point, they nod, and the conversation moves on. What they do not get is the sentence, and the sentence is what moved you, and the sentence is the whole reason you wanted to say it.

When you read it, they get the actual thing. The rhythm, the word that is doing the work, the pause before the last clause. And what happens next is usually not a nod. It is a small silence, and then something better than a nod.

So the substitute is not a smaller version. It is a different transaction, and you have been making it four times a month.

You are handing over summaries and not sentences, and one paragraph read aloud has never once been the same act as one described. Colossians 4:16 has a letter read aloud in a room rather than passed round for private reading, and the Holy Spirit is present with a woman who described a paragraph instead of reading it.

And there is a second layer, and it is where the second thought came from.

Somewhere in the last century or so, reading became something a person does silently and privately, and reading aloud got assigned to children and to the pulpit and to nothing in between. Which means there is no ordinary adult form of it left, and a thing with no ordinary form feels strange to do even when everybody in the room would like it.

That is not manners. It is a gap in the available shapes.

You have permission to do a thing that has lost its ordinary shape, and having no natural opening has never once meant a thing was strange. The written word instructs somebody to arrange the reading aloud in a second room of adults, and His Spirit is the one who hands back a shape that got lost.

One page out loud tonight

So here is the assignment, and the smallness of it is the whole design.

Read one page out loud to somebody in your house tonight.

One page. Or one paragraph, if a page is too much for the moment. Out loud, to a grown person, from whatever you happen to be reading.

And do not build up to it. Do not ask whether they mind. Do not explain first, which is the trap, because explaining first turns it into a proposal and proposals about strange things get declined.

Just say: listen to this. And then read it.

Here is why no preamble.

The strangeness lives entirely in the announcement. Listen to this is a sentence people say about anything, all the time, and it carries no weight at all. It is only when it becomes a proposal about reading aloud that a room has to decide whether that is a thing your household does.

Skip the deciding. Read the paragraph.

You are able to say listen to this and read a paragraph out loud, and three sentences said aloud have never once needed to be introduced. Colossians 4:16 says cause that it be read also, and the Holy Ghost is the one present with a woman reading a paragraph out loud to an adult in her own kitchen.

And expect a small silence afterward rather than a comment. That is the right response and it means it worked.

You have the ordinary form of reading and not the strange one, and a room of grown people has never once been the wrong audience for a page. It is written and when this epistle is read among you, the arrangement is one voice and a room and nobody in the sentence defends it, and the Spirit of God is saying it in a house tonight.