I Hear Him Leading It

The band takes the tempo down and there are four bars of intro before anybody sings, and she knows it from the second bar.

She is out of the row and through the double doors before the first line. She does it smoothly now. Six weeks of practice: a small apologetic smile at the woman on the end, a hand raised as if she has left her phone somewhere, then the corridor, then the lobby.

The lobby has a water cooler that hums, a rack of coats, and a corkboard.

She stands at the corkboard and reads a poster about a Tuesday parenting course for the fourth time this month. There is a picture of a father and a toddler on a slide. Somebody has written a phone number along the bottom in blue pen in case anyone has questions.

Through the doors the song has reached the part where it opens out, and the woman leading it now is doing it beautifully, and it does not matter at all.

Because that is not the voice she hears.

She hears the breath he used to take before the last line. She hears the way he said the second verse rather than sang it, every single time, like he had just thought of it.

He led that song at her wedding. He led it the week her father died. He led it in a garage with six people in it before the church had a building.

And then, six weeks ago, everybody found out who he had also been the whole time.

The water cooler releases a bubble. Somebody comes past and says hi and she says hi in a voice that comes out completely normal.

She used to think of that song as hers. She would have said, without embarrassment, that it was the song God gave her in her twenties.

Now it is four bars and a corridor.

That is you. Maybe not a song. Maybe a chair, a room, a text tone, a particular way of saying goodbye on the phone. Maybe a whole book of the Bible that cannot be opened because it was his, or hers, or theirs. Something you loved got repossessed by somebody who never actually owned it, and your Sundays are now organized around not being in the room when it plays.

Two things before anything else. This is not a failure of faith, and nobody is disappointed in you for standing in a lobby. And I am not going to explain any of this. There is a kind of comfort that arrives holding a reason, and it is not comfort, and I have not brought you one.

David does not pretend it was a stranger

There is a psalm that gets quoted for comfort, almost always from verse 22, cast your burden on the Lord, handed over like a mint. The three verses just before it were written by somebody standing in a lobby.

For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.Psalm 55:12 to 14

Read the last line again. They went to church together.

Not a rival. Not an outsider. His equal, his guide, the person he talked to about God. David does not minimize it, does not reframe it, does not spend a syllable explaining what it was probably for. He says: I could have carried it if it had been anybody else.

You are holding something the Bible holds too, and it did not require you to be over it first. That is not me being generous with you: Psalm 55:12 to 14 puts the whole grievance on the page unedited and keeps it there, and it is the Holy Spirit who inspired a book with a betrayal in it left un-tidied, so that a woman by a corkboard would have somewhere to stand.

Notice what the psalm does not do. It does not tell David he should have seen it coming. It does not audit his discernment. Nothing anywhere in it suggests the problem was that he trusted.

You have not been demoted for having believed somebody. The written word never once treats a deceived person as the guilty party (Psalm 55:13), and His Spirit is the one who says that over you when the accusation starts up again at two in the morning.

If the last six weeks have gone into your sleep, your appetite, your chest, tell a doctor, and tell a counselor. Those are good ordinary rooms and there is nothing unspiritual about sitting in one.

The song was never his to keep

Here is a distinction small enough to carry out of the building tonight.

There is what he did, and there is who God is, and for six weeks those two have been arriving in the same four bars. That is not a flaw in you. That is what a betrayal does. It attaches itself to everything the person touched, and he touched a great deal of it, because that is what trust does with a life.

But go back through the list. The wedding, the week your father died, the garage with six people in it. Ask a plain question about each one: who was actually there?

He was standing at the front. He did not supply the thing that happened in the room.

You were met in that garage by Someone who was not him, and that meeting was real. Scripture separates the messenger from the message so completely that it records the failures of its own preachers in the same book (Psalm 55:14), and it is the Spirit of God, not a man with a guitar, who has ever made a room go quiet in the right way.

I am not asking you to forgive him today. I am not going to put that in front of you as the price of comfort. That is a road, and it is real, and this is not the week for it, and nobody with any sense would push a person onto it. If he is not safe to be near, there is no need to be near him, and no verse in the Bible requires it.

You are allowed to be exactly as angry as you are and still be held. The psalm that says all of this out loud is the same psalm that says God shall sustain thee (Psalm 55:22), and the Holy Spirit keeps both of those in one place without asking you to resolve them by Sunday.