He Put It In The Songbook

The queue goes back nearly to the door because it always does on a Tuesday, and you are near the front holding a suitcase by the handle with a returns label taped over the barcode. Hard shell. Dark green. You had liked it in the shop, and you had stood in the aisle with it and felt something you would now describe as embarrassing.

Nineteen years, and then a meeting room with the door shut and someone reading from a page.

The man behind the counter asks if you have the receipt and you say it is all on the app, and he says that is fine, and he does the thing with the scanner, and it takes about ninety seconds. Then you are back on the pavement with your hands empty and the low sun in your eyes, and the whole of the next five years is gone as completely as the suitcase.

Here is what nobody at that counter could see. You had prayed about that job. Not casually. Properly, over months, with other people, and you had thanked God for it out loud more than once, and you meant every word. And what is in you now, eleven days later, standing on a wet pavement, is not doubt exactly. It is worse than doubt and much harder to say. It is a sentence with His name in it, and it is an accusation, and you have not said it because you are afraid of what happens if you do.

So you have stopped talking to Him altogether. Which is not a decision you made. It is just that everything you would say is that sentence.

The accusations are in the book

I am not going to correct your anger. I am not going to explain what happened, either. I do not know why it happened and neither does anybody who tells you they do, and this message is not going to hand you a reason dressed up as comfort.

What I am going to do is show you where God put sentences exactly like yours.

He put them in the songbook. Not tolerated at the edges of it, not filed under a chapter about doubt: in the hymnal of His own people, set to music, with a note at the top for the choir director, to be sung out loud by the whole congregation for the next three thousand years.

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day?Psalm 13:1-2

Read who that is addressed to. Not about God, to Him. Four times, how long. The second person, present tense, with the accusation pointed straight at the One being sung to. Will you forget me forever. That is not a polite question and it was never softened, and God has kept it, word for word, for everybody.

You are not disqualified today. Not by the sentence, not by eleven days of silence, not by how you feel about Him this morning on a sidewalk outside a post office. That is not me being generous with you; it is what is written, and the Spirit is the one carrying it to a person holding an empty hand where a suitcase was.

He does not need defending, and you do not need editing

Two things get in the way here, and both of them are worth naming.

The first is that people rush to defend God, as though He were fragile and your anger were a threat to Him. He is not, and it is not. The book He gave us contains a man asking how long He is going to hide His face, and He put it in a hymn. Nothing you are carrying today is going to be news to Him, and nothing in it needs to be handled carefully on His behalf before it can be said. The written record is not squeamish, and the Spirit was not scandalized when it went into the hymn book.

The second is that you have been editing. You have been taking the true sentence and looking for a version of it that would be acceptable, and because there is no acceptable version you have said nothing at all. That is where the silence came from. Not rebellion. Editing.

But you have permission that predates this conversation by about three thousand years, and it came with the Spirit already in the room. What is written is not a psalm about being honest with God; it is a psalm being honest with God, kept in the record on purpose so that nobody would ever have to invent the words themselves. You were handed that permission long before eleven days ago, and nothing that has happened since has taken it off you.

And notice what the accusation is actually evidence of. A person does not shout at somebody who is not there. Every one of those four how longs is addressed to a Someone the psalmist has not stopped believing is listening. The anger is not the opposite of faith here. You are still facing Him, which is the only direction any of this has ever needed to be pointed, and that is faith in a very difficult week rather than the failure of it. The Spirit is the one who keeps a heart aimed that way when the words have gone sharp, and it is written into the psalm before it is written into you. That is written into the psalm itself, which turns at the end without ever taking back what it said at the start.

And if these days have got to the point where staying here feels like too much, please tell one real person today and let them stay near you. If it goes further than that, call or text 988 in the United States, or your local emergency number wherever you are, tonight. Reaching for a human being is not a failure of anything, and it has always been one of the ways God sends help.