Hands Up And Nothing Behind Them

Four weeks. She has counted them, which tells you something on its own.

She is on the front row and slightly to the left, which is where she has stood for six years, and she is not on the platform and does not want to be. Her job, unofficially and by universal agreement, is to be the person the room can see worshipping.

Nobody has ever said that to her. It is simply true. When a new song goes badly, people look at her. When the room is flat, she is the reason it lifts, and she knows it, and she has never once been arrogant about it.

For four weeks there has been nothing behind her hands.

She lifts them. She sings every word and she sings them accurately. And there is nothing there: no warmth, no ache, no gratitude, no conviction. Just a woman with her arms up in a room she loves, executing.

And here is what she has been doing about it, which is the actual subject.

She has been apologizing. To God, silently, all the way through every song. I am sorry. I do not know what is wrong with me. I am sorry. Four weeks of running an apology underneath the worship, which means she has spent a month doing two things at once and neither of them well.

And underneath the apology, the fear, which she would not say to anybody: that people are being led by somebody who is not there, and that this makes her a kind of fraud.

He interrogated his own soul in public

There is a psalm that gets sung in cheerful arrangements and is actually a man cross examining himself in front of everybody.

Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance.Psalm 42:5

Take that on the front row. You are permitted to keep going without knowing what is wrong. The word has the psalmist asking his own soul why and getting no answer at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that in the book for an empty month.

Two questions and then an instruction, and every one of them is aimed at his own insides.

He does not know why. That is the first thing to notice, and it is enormous. He asks the question and the psalm does not supply an answer. A man in Scripture, writing worship material, says out loud: I do not know what is wrong with me.

And then, without having solved it, he says the sentence that carries the whole thing: I shall yet praise Him.

Yet. Not now. Yet.

That word is written by somebody who has nothing today and is not pretending otherwise, and who is making a statement about a future he cannot presently feel his way into. Yet is a word for people in exactly your fourth week.

So take this on the front row, and know it is not my reassurance, it is what is written: you are not required to know what is wrong with you before you may keep going. His word has the psalmist asking his own soul why and getting no answer, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that in the book precisely so that somebody standing with their hands up would not conclude that dryness is fraud.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote something like six thousand hymns, and the theory of the whole project was that the words come first and the feeling follows after.

That is what a hymn is for. It is a true thing put into a person's mouth, on a day when nothing true is coming out of them under their own steam, so that the truth gets in anyway and is available later.

And the man who wrote most of them wrote a great many about dryness, about heaviness, about not being able to feel a thing. He wrote them because he knew that condition well, and because he refused to write only for people having a good week, which would have been useless to the miners and servants he was writing for.

The words are ahead of you. They were always ahead of you. Singing them while your chest is empty is not fraud, it is the entire design.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the hymn was the hinge, especially in a flat month.