Singing Words You Could Not Feel

There is a woman in the third row who cries about halfway through the second song, most weeks, and she has no idea that anybody at the front can see her.

She can. From up there you can see everything, and that is a thing nobody warns you about. You can see who came in late and who is not singing and who has their hand on their husband's back. You can see a boy of about sixteen who has started closing his eyes in the last month and did not use to.

On the Sunday she is thinking about, that woman in the third row put both hands over her face during the line about God being good, and stood there like that for the rest of the song, and it was plainly the realest thing happening in that building.

And at the front, four feet away with a microphone, the person leading it felt precisely nothing.

Not resistance. Not doubt. She has thought about how to describe it and the closest she gets is this: it was like being the waiter at a very good dinner. She carried the plates. She knew what was on them. She could tell from the room that it was excellent. She did not eat anything.

She sang seven songs that morning and she believes every word in all seven. That is the part that makes it unbearable rather than merely sad. If she had doubts she could go and deal with doubts. This is not doubt. This is a woman who would defend those lyrics against any comer and who stood there singing them in her own voice into her own room and could not locate one gram of it inside herself.

Afterwards a man she has known for years said thank you, that was wonderful, and put his hand on her shoulder for a second, and she said something warm back and went and stood in the corridor by the fire door.

And in the corridor the thought arrived that has been circling since March, and this time it landed properly, and the thought is: I am the only person in that room not having what I am running.

Fixed is not a temperature

Psalm 57 has a note at the top of it that people skip. It says it was written when David fled from Saul in the cave.

Hold that. Not a stage. Not a good season. A hole in a hill, a man hunted by a king, sleeping badly, hiding, with an army outside looking for him. And out of that cave comes one of the most exuberant lines in the psalter.

My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed: I will sing and give praise.Psalm 57:7

He says it twice, which in Hebrew is how you say it once with your whole weight on it.

And look at the word. Fixed means set, established, made firm, pointed in a direction and held there. It is a word about position, not about temperature. He is not reporting that he feels wonderful in the cave. He is stating where his heart is aimed, and then, in the very next clause, deciding to sing.

Then read the next verse and it becomes almost funny in its honesty. Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I myself will awake early. He is telling his own soul to wake up. That is a man leading worship in a room where the only person present is himself, and he is not feeling it either.

So hear this over you, out in that corridor. You were not faking on Sunday. Not for one second of seven songs. That is not my reassurance; it is what His word shows a fixed heart actually looks like from the inside, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who takes a psalm heading like in the cave and turns it into oxygen for a woman by a fire door.

Now watch what that does to the flatness.

If worship is a feeling you generate and then distribute, then a flat Sunday is a fraud, and standing at the front of one is the worst thing you could be doing. That is exactly the case you have been building against yourself since March. But if worship is a heart fixed in a direction and a mouth that goes ahead and sings, then Sunday was not a performance of something absent. It was the thing itself, done in the cave version, which is the version the psalm is actually about.

And here is what I want you to hold on to about the woman in the third row.

Nothing that happened to her came out of you. You did not manufacture it and you could not have. God met a woman during a line about His goodness while the person singing the line felt nothing at all, and both of those facts sat in the same room at the same time without contradicting each other for one second. Scripture never once ties what God does in a room to the emotional weather of the one leading it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moved on row three, in a building where the leader was carrying plates.

You are not a waiter. You are one of the people at the table who happens to have lost their appetite for a season, which is a completely different thing and is not a moral event.

You are held this morning exactly as flat as you are. Not when the feeling comes back. Now, in a corridor, because His word says a heart can be fixed while everything else in a person is in a cave, and the Holy Spirit does not require a warm chest before He will settle on somebody.

I want to name one more thing, because it is the quiet cost. You have not told anybody. The reason is that saying it out loud in your world sounds like a resignation, and you are afraid that the first person you tell will start being gentle with you in a way that ends with somebody else on the microphone. That fear is understandable and it is not the truth about you, and the loneliest part of March was never the flatness. It was carrying the flatness by yourself and calling that professionalism.