A Year of Singing for Other People

The running order is laminated because it gets wet, and it has been laminated for eleven years.

She knows the room from the front. She knows which two songs to keep in whatever else changes, which key drops the men in, which line makes the back three rows finally lift their heads. She can watch it land. That is the strange privilege of standing where she stands: she can actually see the moment a room stops performing and starts meaning it.

She is genuinely glad about that. Not pretending. Glad.

She just has not felt any of it herself since last September.

Not numb exactly, and not sad in a way anybody would notice. It is more that the thing she is holding out to two hundred people is a thing she cannot seem to eat. She sings the line about His goodness and she believes it entirely, and it goes past her like weather.

After the morning service she coils the cable. Over the elbow, under the elbow, the same loop she has made ten thousand times, thumb pressing the twist out at the end of each turn. Somebody is stacking chairs. The urn is being emptied into the sink.

A man she half knows comes over and says the third song got him through his week. Says it awkwardly, the way men do when they mean it, and then stands there a second too long because he has run out of sentence.

And she says, "Oh, I'm so glad." And she means it. She really does.

Then she carries the cable out to the car and sits in the driver's seat with it on her lap and tries to think of one thing she herself is glad about, and finds she cannot get hold of one. Not a big one. Not a small one either.

She turns the radio on so the car has a noise in it, and drives home, and makes lunch.

You know that car park. Maybe you are not on a platform. Maybe it is a Sunday school class, or a rota, or a house where you are the one who keeps everybody's spirits up, or a family where the gladness has been outsourced to you and nobody has ever thought to ask where you get yours from.

And the thing nobody warns you about is that you can be completely sincere and completely empty at the same time, and both of those are true at once, and neither one cancels the other.

Nobody is being told to cheer up

Let us get the wrong version out of the way first, because it is the version most likely to be handed to you.

Nobody here is going to tell you that joy is a decision somebody has been failing to make. That is not what this is, and a flat year is not a discipline problem. If the flatness is heavy, and has been heavy for a long time, that is worth saying out loud to a doctor or to a person who can sit with you properly, and there is nothing unspiritual about that. Some tiredness is real tiredness, and it is not repented of. It is rested from, and cared for.

So this page will not prescribe gladness. It will do something else, which is to move the whole question of where joy comes from out of your hands, because that is where it has been sitting for a year and it was never yours to manufacture.

You have not been failing at joy. Scripture calls it fruit of the Spirit rather than an output of effort, which puts the growing of it on Him and the receiving of it on you, and the Holy Spirit does not grade the ones who have had a thin season.

Now the verse. It is a strange one and it is not the one usually chosen for this.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Read who is singing.

Not the congregation. Not the woman with the laminated sheet. Him. There is a song going on over you, in your direction, from the front, and you have spent a year standing where you could not hear it because you were the one making the noise.

You are being sung over by God while you sing to a room. Zephaniah 3:17 says exactly that, that He joys over you with singing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a tired woman hear a line that has been over her head all year.

The joy that is offered and never demanded

There is a difference between joy and cheerfulness and it matters enormously here.

Cheerfulness is a performance, and it can be produced on demand, and it has been produced faultlessly since September. Joy is not a performance and cannot be produced at all. It arrives. It is a gift, it comes with a Person, and the only correct posture toward it is an open hand.

Which means the last year has not been you running out. It has been you giving away something you were not being handed, and no reservoir survives that, and there is no shame anywhere in this paragraph.

You are allowed to be the one who receives this morning. Scripture has Jesus telling the disciples to come apart into a desert place and rest a while, and He said it because they had not so much as had time to eat, and the Holy Spirit is not more interested in your rota than He is in you.

And there is a fear underneath, and it is worth naming, because it is the sentence that keeps the cable coiling.

I have become a machine for producing something I cannot feel. And if I stopped, there would be nothing under it.

You are not hollow, and the flat year has not proved that you are. Scripture says the joy of the Lord is your strength, which locates it in Him and describes it as something that holds you up rather than something you generate, and the Holy Spirit is not withdrawn from a person who has had a hard September.