They Flinched

She flinched.

Or you think she did. Something happened around the eyes, or the mouth went a certain way, or there was a pause that was a quarter second longer than it should have been.

And before she had said a single word, the price came down out of your mouth.

I want to go and stand in that quarter second with you, because a great deal is happening in it and almost none of it is what you think.

Here is the first thing. You do not know what that face was.

It might have been her doing arithmetic. It might have been her thinking about whether her husband would mind. It might have been a thing about her back. It might have been about the price and it might have been about the price in a good way, meaning she expected worse.

You have been treating a face as an answer, and an expression has never once been the same thing as a sentence somebody said.

And I am not going to tell you what to charge or how to work it out. That is yours and it is arithmetic, and this site does not hand out arithmetic dressed up as ministry.

What I want to deal with is the reading of faces, because that is what has actually been running your prices for about four years.

The fear of man bringeth a snare

There is a proverb that names this exactly, and the word it uses is a trap rather than a sin.

The fear of man bringeth a snare: but whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe. (Proverbs 29:25, King James Version)

The fear of man bringeth a snare.

A snare is a thing that closes on an animal that walked into it without knowing it was there. It is not a moral failing. It is a mechanism, and the point of naming it is so that a person can see the wire.

You are looking at a mechanism rather than a character flaw, and reading a room too closely has never once been a sin somebody needed forgiving for. Proverbs 29:25 calls it a snare, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names the wire so that it can be seen.

And the second half is the exit, and it is worth noticing what it is not.

It does not say, but whoso stops caring what people think. It says, whoso putteth his trust in the LORD shall be safe. The cure is not indifference to people. It is having your feet on something else while you are with them.

You have been offered something to stand on rather than a thicker skin, and a woman who feels every face in a room has never once been asked to stop feeling them. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person somewhere else to be standing, and it is written in Proverbs 29:25 as a trust rather than as a hardening.

What you actually did in that quarter second

Let me trace what happened, slowly, because at normal speed it feels like one event and it is three.

First, a face moved. That is the only fact in the whole sequence.

Second, you assigned a meaning to it. That meaning was manufactured, by you, at speed, with no evidence, and it was the least flattering of the available options.

Third, you acted on that manufactured meaning as if it were a statement she had made out loud.

You are acting on a sentence nobody said, and a meaning assigned in a quarter second has never once been the same as a thing somebody told you. The written word calls the fear of man a snare that closes on a person who did not see it, and the Spirit of God is the one who slows a sequence down enough to be looked at.

And here is the cost, and it is not only the money.

When you drop the price in response to a face, she learns something about her own face. She learns that it works.

That is not a happy arrangement for either of you. She did not set out to do that, and now you are both in it.

You are in a pattern neither person chose, and a reflex has never once been the same as a negotiation. The Holy Spirit is the one who breaks a pattern that two people have fallen into by accident, and Proverbs 29:25 puts the safety in a different place than the room.

Let her use her words

So the assignment, and it has two halves, and the second one is the whole of it.

Say your price out loud to yourself three times, then say it to the next person who asks.

And then, when the face does whatever the face does, let her speak.

If she thinks it is too much, she is completely capable of saying so. Women say so all the time. She does not need you to say it on her behalf before she has decided anything.

You are able to let another woman speak for herself, and waiting for actual words has never once been the same as being stubborn. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a person through a pause, and the written word puts the trap in the fearing rather than in the pricing.

And if she does say it is too much, that is fine, and it is information, and it is the first real information in the whole exchange. Then you decide, deliberately, in your own time, whether to move. A decision is a completely different object from a reflex.

You are allowed to move a price on purpose, and a considered decision has never once been the same thing as a flinch answered with a flinch. The Holy Spirit is the one who gives a person back their own choices, and it is written in Proverbs 29:25 that safety comes from where a person is standing rather than from what a room is doing.