The Songs She Knows Too Well

Forty songs, near enough, on a rolling list, and she has sung all of them more times than she could count.

Ten years of it. She is not on a platform, she is in the third row, and she is one of those people a room quietly leans on without knowing it, because she is always there and she always sings and something about that steadies a hall.

Here is what she noticed in March, standing in her usual place with her coat over her arm.

She could not hear a single word of what she was singing.

Not the sound. The sound was fine. She means that the words went past her the way the safety announcement goes past you on an airplane. She sang a line about God holding her, sang it perfectly, in tune, on time, and it landed nowhere at all, and she was aware while it was happening that it was landing nowhere.

She has thought about it a good deal since, and the conclusion she has quietly reached is the one most people reach, and it is the wrong one.

She has decided the problem is her. That she has gone cold. That other people in that room are being genuinely moved and she has become somebody who is not.

She has told nobody, because it sounds like an accusation against the church and she would rather chew glass than have anybody think that.

If you cannot hear the thing you say every week, come and sit down at this table. Nobody is going to tell you to feel more.

The word has its own errand

There is a promise in Isaiah that says something about Scripture which quietly takes an enormous weight off a person.

So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth. It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.Isaiah 55:11

Notice who is doing the work in that sentence. Not the hearer. The word goes out, the word accomplishes, the word succeeds. It is described as a thing sent on an errand, and the errand belongs to the One who sent it.

That matters enormously for a woman in the third row who has concluded that she is the problem.

Because if the word is doing the work, then what happened to you in March is not a report on your heart. It is a report on speed.

You have not gone cold, and there is nothing wrong with you. Isaiah 55:11 puts the accomplishing on the word rather than on the person receiving it, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it in, which means what you have lost is not warmth but time, and those are two completely different problems.

Familiar is not the same as finished

Now the second half, and it is the one that changes what you do about it.

A line you have said four hundred times has not been used up. Words do not wear out. What happens is that your ears learn the shape of the sentence so well that they stop attending to the middle of it, which is a mercy in a fire drill and a nuisance in a hymn.

And there is nothing sinful in that. It is what a brain is for.

So nobody is asking you to feel more. That is the instruction people usually get and it is useless, because feeling is not something a person can produce on request, and trying to produce it is what makes church exhausting.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Colossians 2:7 speaks of being rooted and built up in Him, both of them ongoing rather than finished, and it is the Spirit who does the building, which means nothing about ten years in the third row is a ceiling.

Here is the whole of what is on offer, and it is not more of anything. It is slower.

You cannot slow down a room, and you should not try. But you can take one line, on your own, in a kitchen, at half the speed, out loud, and let your ears catch what they have been skating over for a decade.

You have not run out and there is nothing here that has stopped working. Psalm 1:3 says the tree planted by streams of water yields its fruit in its season and its leaf does not wither, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the same words you have handled hundreds of times and makes them food again, which is the one thing no amount of trying to feel could arrange.

And under all of it, the ground this site stands on: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The root is not your achievement, and neither is the hearing. It is where He planted you and it is what He is still doing there.