The Song She Will Not Sing at Home

She has a voice. Everybody in that building knows it and has known it since she was fourteen, and there are people who come early for the second service specifically because she is usually on it.

She sings that song without a thought. It has been in rotation for about four years and she has led it perhaps sixty times, and there is a line in the second verse that she has sent out over four hundred people without ever once catching on it.

Yvette is thirty nine.

She cannot sing that line in her own kitchen.

She has tried. Not as an experiment, exactly, but there have been mornings with the radio on when it has come up and she has been at the sink with nobody in the house and she has come to that line and it will not come out. Not tears. Not a lump. It simply does not go. She hums through it and carries on and the rest of the song is fine.

The difference is not the audience. That is the part she has been unable to work out. She is not more confident in a crowd. If anything the opposite.

The difference is that in a room full of people, a line goes out. In an empty kitchen, it goes to God, and there is nobody else to absorb any of it.

There is a reason. It sits in her own life and she has never described it to anybody and does not intend to.

If there is something you can say in a crowd and not alone, this is written for you. And before anything: nothing here will ask you to describe it. Not to a person, not to a group, not to me. This is between you and God and it stays that way.

Which side it is cited on

Here is the line.

shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the secrets of the heart.

Now, that gets quoted on its own constantly, and quoted on its own it sounds like a warning. He knows the secrets. Watch yourself.

Read the psalm and it is doing the exact opposite.

Psalm 44 is a complaint. The people are in a terrible stretch and they are saying so bluntly, and in the middle of it they make an argument about themselves: that they have not turned back, that their heart has not gone the other way, and then they say this. If we had forgotten Him, would God not search that out? For He knows the secrets of the heart.

They are citing His knowledge of their secrets as evidence for their integrity.

They are saying: You can see all the way in, so You of all people know we are telling the truth. His access to the hidden part is being appealed to. It is on their side of the argument, and they bring it forward themselves, in a complaint, as their strongest point.

You have a knowledge of your hidden parts that Scripture brings forward as evidence for a person rather than against them. Psalm 44:21 appears inside an appeal and is cited by the ones being examined, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written appeal and makes it real in a person, so this does not rest on how much of it lands at a kitchen sink.

That is not a small correction. It changes who the searching belongs to.

Because a woman who cannot sing a line alone is not afraid that God will find something. She has assumed all along that He knows. What has been happening is that the knowing has felt like an accusation waiting to be read out, and in a crowd there is enough noise to keep the reading from happening.

There is no reading. In that psalm the knowledge is the defense.

You have been braced against a reading that Scripture never once schedules. It is written as an appeal made by the people themselves, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written appeal into a life, which is why it holds in a kitchen with nobody in the house.

Why alone is harder

I want to say something about the mechanics of it, because it is worth understanding and almost nobody says it.

In a room, a line goes out. There are four hundred people and the words leave and land on all of them and the room absorbs it, and what a singer feels is participation. It is shared.

Alone, there is no absorption. The line goes one direction only, from a person to God, and there is nothing in between, and so the whole of it arrives.

That is not a failure of courage. It is a completely accurate perception of what is different about the two situations. Alone is more direct, and direct is harder, and anybody who tells you otherwise has not tried it with something that costs.

So the reason the kitchen is harder is not that she has less faith at the sink. It is that the sink has no crowd to spread the weight, and the weight has been real the whole time.

You are experiencing directness rather than a shortage of anything. Scripture puts the appeal in the plural in a psalm sung by a whole people, and the same Spirit at work in that psalm is the one testifying inside a person now.

Something belongs here in the middle where nobody can skip it. If the humming through has gotten heavier over the years, if the nights have been getting long, or if the thinking has traveled out past the ache and toward wishing to be gone, get a person alongside you. Talk to your doctor. Sit down with a counselor. And you do not have to say one word about the reason to do that: a good one will never require it, and a woman can be well helped for years without ever naming it. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another human being be with you in it. None of that is a failure of faith. God has always worked through people.

The humming is not a lie

Now I want to speak to the thing that I suspect actually sits on her, and it is not the line.

It is the humming.

She has led that song sixty times in front of hundreds of people and hummed through one bar at her own sink, and somewhere in her that has started to read as a discrepancy, and a discrepancy in a person who leads worship starts to read as a character question.

It is not a discrepancy. It is two different acts.

Singing a line over a congregation is proclamation. It is saying a true thing about God, in public, so other people can stand on it. That was true every one of the sixty times and not one of those rooms was defrauded.

Singing it alone to God is something else. It is not proclamation, it is address. And a person can be entirely able to do the first and not yet able to do the second, and those two are not in competition and one does not falsify the other.

You have been doing two different things rather than one of them dishonestly. Psalm 44:21 is spoken by people making a public appeal, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a body.

And I am not going to tell you that line comes out at the sink next month. It might not for years, and that would not be a failure and it would not mean anything about your fitness to lead.

You are clean right now with the bar still hummed through, and the humming has never once been a witness about you. It is written and it is settled, and it is His Spirit rather than the strength of your agreement who makes a settled thing real in a body.