I Was Meant to Sing on Sunday

The hallway outside the main room has a noticeboard on it with three out of date flyers and a photograph of a mission trip from six years ago, and Tamsin has now read all of it twice.

She can hear the band running the second song through the wall. She knows the song. She picked the song. There is a folder in her bag with the running order in it in her own handwriting, and her name is on the sheet in the second slot, and it is eighteen minutes to.

She got as far as the hallway. She has been standing at the noticeboard for six minutes because standing at a noticeboard is the only way to be in a corridor without being a person who is standing in a corridor.

Last night happened. It has been a long time and it happened, and it happened for no reason she can point at, which is somehow the worst part, because there is not even a story to tell about it.

And what is going on in her, standing here in a coat she has not taken off, is not really about the singing. It is a much older and simpler thing, and it goes like this: whatever I was, I am not that now. The version of her who picked those songs on Thursday evening is a person she can see very clearly and cannot get back to, and the distance between the two of them is eighteen minutes and a door.

Through the wall the band stops and starts the same eight bars again.

Let me talk to you, if this is your morning and your corridor.

I am not going to ask you how long it had been. Nobody is counting and nobody is going to. I am not going to say a word about starting again, because you are not at a start line, you are standing in a hallway and the hallway is in the middle of a real life. And I am not going to tell you what last night means, because it does not mean what it is currently shouting at you, and I will not add anything to what you are already holding.

You are not abandoned in the dark and you were never left there to sit alone. Micah says when I sit in darkness the Lord shall be a light unto me, which grants the sitting and the darkness both, and then puts somebody in there with you; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present fact in a corridor with a noticeboard on the wall.

When I fall, I shall arise

Let me name the thing that is actually keeping you in the hallway, because it is not the room and it is not the people.

It is the gap between two versions of yourself. The one who made the running order and the one standing at the noticeboard, and you can see both of them, and you cannot work out how to be the first one again, and every second in this corridor makes the gap look wider. That is not weakness. That is what shame does: it separates you from your own history and then tells you the history was a lie.

So here is what Micah says, and I want you to hear who he is talking to when he says it.

Rejoice not against me, O mine enemy: when I fall, I shall arise; when I sit in darkness, the Lord shall be a light unto me.Micah 7:8

The first line is aimed at an enemy who is enjoying this. That tells you two things straight away. The fall is real, because you cannot gloat over an imaginary one. And there is somebody in the room who wants your interpretation of it to stick.

Then look at the grammar of the second line: when I fall, I shall arise. Not if. When. It is written by somebody who is not pretending falling is not a thing that happens to people who love God, and who in the same breath refuses to treat it as the end of the sentence.

You have a rising written into the same sentence as the fall, and you were never handed one half of that verse on its own. That is what stands written in Micah 7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a prophet's answer to a gloating enemy and puts it into the mouth of a woman standing in a coat she has not taken off.

Now the third line, and this is the one I want you to carry out of here. When I sit in darkness. Not when I walk through darkness. Sit. He grants the sitting. He grants that a person can be in the dark and not moving and not currently getting anywhere. And into that exact posture he says: the Lord shall be a light unto me. Not the Lord shall send a light. The Lord shall be one. The presence is the light, so there is no waiting period between being in the dark and having Him, because He is what arrives.

You have the Lord Himself as the light in this corridor, and you were never required to get up first in order to qualify for Him. Scripture says the Lord shall be a light unto me, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true of a hallway at eighteen minutes to, in a coat, at a noticeboard.

And look at the next verse, because Micah keeps going and it matters: he says he will bear the indignation of the Lord because he has sinned, until He plead his cause and execute judgement for him, and He will bring me forth to the light and I shall behold his righteousness. That is a man not arguing about what happened and also not accepting the verdict of the one gloating. He hands the whole case to God, who is described as his defense counsel and not his prosecutor.

You are represented by somebody who took your case, and you were never left to argue your own worth in a corridor. The written word has God pleading the cause, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a case out of a person's shaking hands on the morning they are least able to make it.

And the plain thing, said here in the middle where you will see it. If your body is in a bad way, go and see a doctor, today, and be honest with them. Never make decisions about stopping or about your body alone. Beyond that: the friend who already knows, the counselor, the helpline, the room where people sit in a circle and say true things out loud, all of that is God's kindness with a face on it. Reaching for it today is not a failure of faith. It has always been one of the main ways He holds people up, and I would rather you rang somebody than sang anything.