191 Wisdom in Camouflage

Sharing Ancient Truths with a Secular World, Without Ever Saying Their Name

Speaking in Code

You know the feeling. The phone rings. It’s a friend, and her voice has that particular thinness, the one that means the world has been grinding her down between its molars for days. She’s in the corporate arena, a place of polished floors and unpolished intentions and some new conflict has bloomed, a nasty little fungus of office politics and personality clashes. She needs to talk. I listen.

She offers the play-by-play: the misunderstood email, the sidelong glance in the meeting, the credit snatched, the alliance formed against her. It’s a familiar liturgy. As she speaks, my mind doesn’t race for solutions. Instead, it settles into a strange, deep calm. I realize, with a clarity that feels less like thought and more like remembrance, that there is nothing new here. The stage is glass and steel, the costumes are business casual, but the play is ancient. The roles, the betrayer, the proud, the fearful, the gossip are older than cuneiform. God, I think, has seen this exact scene before. In fact, He wrote it.

So when I finally speak, my words are few. They aren’t advice, not really. They are simple, structural observations. Some people aren’t worth the truth you’re trying to give them,” I say. “They’ll only use it to hurt you.” Or: “Maybe just listen for now. Let the heat of it pass before you say anything permanent.” She nods, soothed by the pragmatism of it. She hears tactics. She does not hear Matthew 7:6. She does not hear James 1:19.

This is the delicate part. My friend is an atheist. A proud, rational, “show-me-the-empirical-data” atheist. If she suspected for a moment that the scaffolding of my comfort was built from verses, the entire conversation would collapse. Her mind would shutter. Her heart, that already hard-tamped soil, would turn to stone. It’s not a hostility toward me, but toward a system she believes traffics in fairy tales and oppression. To offer her a Bible verse directly would be, in her eyes, an act of profound disrespect, like trying to heal a broken arm with a recitation of magical incantations.

But here is what I understood, sitting there with the phone growing warm against my ear: The truth does not cease to be true simply because I strip it of its attribution.

The wisdom…don’t cast your precious things before those who will only destroy them; be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath, this is human truth. It is observable and repeatable. It is the physics of relationship and conflict. The Bible didn’t invent it; it cataloged and gave it a home and a context. But the principle exists independent of the source. It works.

After we hung up, after her grateful sigh and her “thank you, just for listening,” I sent her two texts. Just the verses. No context, no sermon. Just the citations: Matthew 7:6, James 1:19. Let her look them up or ignore them. Let her find the echo of our conversation there and feel a chill of recognition, or let her dismiss it as my odd piety. The seed, if it is to grow, will do so in the dark.

This is, I think, my quiet work. I live in a time that has forgotten the cycles. Ecclesiastes 3 drones beneath the noise of my life: a time to break down, and a time to build up. We see each hurt as unprecedented, each injustice a unique flaw in the universe. But it’s all happened before. God, as the Teacher says, “seeks what has been driven away”. He rounds up the scattered, recurring themes of human existence and presents them to us again, dressed for our current age.

So I speak the truth. I use the old, old words, even when I must translate them on my tongue into the dialect of the moment. The listening ear doesn’t need to know the language the music was first written in to be moved by the melody. My atheist friend doesn’t need to believe in the composer to find solace in the song. She just needs to know that someone else hears the same dissonance she does and knows the chord that will resolve it.

I let my speech be code. I let the wisdom wear the camouflage of common sense. My goal is not to win a theological argument; it is to suture a wound. And sometimes my most holy act is to hide the holiness, so the medicine can be taken.

That is all and thank you for reading.

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