She Cannot Sing the Songs He Chose

Third row, on the aisle, where she has sat for six years.

The band comes in on the second song and she feels the room stand up around her, the small collective shift of a hundred people getting to their feet at the same time, and somebody two chairs down knocks a bulletin off a seat. There are goldfish crackers on the carpet from the early service. The woman next to her is already singing with her eyes shut and one hand lifted about as high as her shoulder.

The words go up on the screen.

She knows this one. She knows the second verse without looking, because she learned it in a car in a parking lot before a shift, and there was a season two winters ago when she could not get through the second verse without her voice going.

Her hands stay at her sides.

It is not that the song has become a bad song. It is that every one of these songs was picked by one man. He built the list. He rehearsed the list. For six years he stood up there and told this room what the songs meant before they sang them, and three weeks ago what he had actually been doing came out, and now he is not in the building, and the songs are.

The room goes up into the last chorus, the way it always does, and there is a key change, and the sound of it lifts, and she is standing in the middle of it with her mouth shut.

Afterward she goes out to the lobby and pours coffee into a paper cup she does not want and stands in front of the notice board reading a flyer about a men's breakfast, twice, so that she is doing something with her face.

That is you, third row, mouth closed.

Maybe yours is not a song list. Maybe it is a verse you cannot read now, or a room you cannot walk into, or a whole way of praying that has his fingerprints on it, or a marriage, or a father, or a friend of twenty years who turned out to be running something on the side the entire time.

Two things, and I will not be in a hurry with either of them.

The first is that this really happened, and it was really done to you, and I am not going to hand you a reason. Anybody who has offered you a purpose for it in the last three weeks was guessing, kindly, and it cost you something to be polite about it.

The second is that nobody here is going to ask you to forgive him before you are allowed to be comforted. Comfort is not on the far side of a transaction. It is not being held back from you until you produce something.

Two things that were never his

There is a strange passage in Hebrews about an oath, and it belongs to you this week more than almost anything else in the book.

The writer says that when God made His promise, He swore by Himself, because there was nobody greater to swear by. Then he says why. So that by two unchangeable things, God's promise and God's oath, people running for shelter would have something to hold that does not move.

so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us.Hebrews 6:18

Sit with the middle of it. Impossible for God to lie. Not unlikely. Not out of character. Impossible, the way it is impossible for water to be dry.

That is a category statement, and the reason it matters this morning is that three weeks ago somebody showed you what a person can be made of. A person can say true words in a true voice for six years and be running something underneath the whole time. That is a real capability of a real human being, it got demonstrated to you at close range, and it will not be un-known.

You are dealing with a God who is not in that category, and the difference is not a matter of degree. Hebrews 6:18 does not say God chooses not to lie, it says the thing is impossible to Him, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that distinction land in a woman whose whole instinct right now is to treat every voice as a possible front.

Then look at who the sentence is written to. Not the composed. Not the people who saw it coming and were not taken in. It is written to we who have fled for refuge, which is the language of somebody arriving at a run, out of breath, with the door still open behind them.

You were not written off when you ran, and arriving out of breath is the posture the verse actually names. What is written puts refuge language around people mid-flight rather than people who have processed it, and His Spirit is the one who keeps the door standing open while a person is still shaking on the step.

And nowhere in that passage is anybody told they should have seen it coming.

You have not been handed one word of blame in this text, and I am not adding any. Hebrews 6 hangs the whole weight on God binding Himself, never on the reader reading someone correctly, and the same Spirit who moved on that page is the one sitting beside you in a folding chair with your hands at your sides.

What he did not choose

He chose the song list. He chose the order, and the key, and the week.

He did not choose that God is faithful.

That was true before he was born. It was true in the mouths of people who sang about it in languages he never heard, and it will be true in rooms he never stood in, and it did not become his property by passing through his hands. He was holding it. Holding a thing is not the same as owning it, and he could not take with him something that was never his.

You are not required to hand him what he did not have, and the second verse was never his to take. The written word says the promise stands on God's own oath rather than on the character of anyone who repeats it, and it is the Holy Spirit, not a worship leader, who has been making those words live in you in a parking lot before a shift.

You have a hope described as set before you, put there and left there, and nothing that came out three weeks ago reached it. Hebrews 6:18 makes it something God set down rather than something a person passed along, and His Spirit is what makes an anchored sentence hold in a room where you cannot sing. Here is one more way to see it.