Two decades have passed since I published the original version of this post as a newspaper column. Now, smart phones go wherever we do, and messaging has become even more instant. Today, I remind myself again:

It’s okay to take time to ponder.

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If you’re one of the people waiting for me to answer your email, please be patient. I can explain.

No, actually, I can’t explain. But I think it has something to do with the century in which I was born.

I’d have done well in the days of quill and ink. In that era, while you were blotting, you had time to ponder what to say next.

In today’s email era, people expect a reply roughly 4.5 seconds after clicking the Send button. That’s no problem for some of the guys on my team at work. They can answer 120 emails in just under 12 minutes.

And me? Well, I delete the deletable stuff immediately, especially anything forwarded that says, “If you do not send this warning and/or message of love to your 25 closest friends, you are dirty scum not fit to walk the earth.” But when it comes to real messages demanding real answers, I ponder. I deliberate. I labor over the briefest of replies.

If you wrote me but haven’t heard back, I’ve read your message – and appreciated it greatly. I probably also clicked Reply, typed, “Hi!” and, several agonizing minutes later, clicked the button to Delete my half-written response. I quit mid-message because:

• I couldn’t think what to say;
• I couldn’t think how to say it; and/or
• 358 other duties, including 71 more unanswered emails, were shouting from all directions, “You’re taking too long with that one little message! Hurry!”

Alas, the word “hurry” often does more harm than good. In some cases, it can even create Email Response Paralysis, also known as ERP.

So here I sit, swamped with messages, trying desperately not to ERP, while my unanswered senders echo the cry of a young upstart named Elihu, to a sufferer named Job:

Behold, I waited for your words … while you pondered what to say. (Job 32:11)

My accusers are right. I’m guilty as charged: a confirmed ponderer. But may I say in my own defense: Pondering may make for slower answers, but it may also make for better ones.

In Proverbs 5:5-6, a man known for his wisdom used these words to describe the woman who “does not ponder the path of life”: “Her feet go down to death. Her ways are unstable, she does not know it.” Not a good scenario, I’d say.

By contrast, this same wise man declared in Proverbs 15:28:

The heart of the righteous ponders how to answer.

Now hang with me here. In the original language of the Old Testament, this word ponder is hagah, a close cousin to our own, “Ah hah!” A man named Vine who wrote a dictionary explaining such words, said, “It seems to be an onomatopoetic term, reflecting the sighing and low sounds one may make while musing.”

If we stuff all the meanings of hagah into that one sentence from Proverbs, it reads: “The heart of the righteous moans, growls, utters, muses, mutters, meditates, devises, plots, speaks.”

Notice that the speaking (or in this case email writing) comes after much rather noisy deliberation.

So if you’re expecting an e-reply from me, take heart: it will eventually come. Meanwhile, imagine me sitting at my computer (or holding my smart phone), moaning, muttering, meditating, musing until that ah hah! moment when I know just what to say.

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“Email Response Paralysis” was originally published as a “Perspective” newspaper column in 2001. Then, as Snapshot 102 in Focused Living in a Frazzled World, by Deborah Brunt, © 2005. It was first posted on the Key Truths blog October 25, 2012.

Scripture quotations are from the New American Standard Bible.