Hands Up, Thinking About The Parking

Third song. The one with the long build.

Your hands went up at the point where they always go up, and you were not deciding to do it, they just went, the way they have for about fifteen years.

And you were thinking about whether you had left enough room for the car next to you to get out.

Then you thought about the car after that. Then whether the thing in the oven was going to be all right. Then, briefly and without any warning, about a conversation from Thursday that you have not resolved.

And then the song ended and somebody said something warm from the front and you put your hands down and sat.

That is the whole of it. That is what happened.

And you have been carrying it since, on and off, as evidence.

Because the version of you that stood there fifteen years ago with her hands up meant it in a way that you would describe, if pushed, as burning. And the version standing there this morning had her arms in exactly the same position and her mind in a car park.

You are not worried that you are a hypocrite, exactly. You would not use that word.

What you are worried about is that this might be what your faith actually is now. That the burning was a phase, and this is the settled state, and everyone else in that room is somewhere you used to be.

Let me say something before we go one step further.

I am not telling you off.

There is nothing shameful in this and I am not going to hand you a talk about being present. You have almost certainly given yourself that talk in the car and it did not work, because you cannot get to authenticity by trying harder at it.

I am saying I know where you were during the third song. That is all.

What He wants in the inward parts

Here is David, in the psalm he wrote at the worst point of his life, saying what God is actually after.

Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.Psalm 51:6

Truth in the inward parts.

Not performance in the outward ones. Not heat. Not a particular quality of feeling during a song. Truth. Which is to say, accuracy. Correspondence between what is actually the case inside a person and what that person is holding out to God.

And look at the second half, because it is the half nobody reads. In the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. He does not say, in the hidden part I will generate something impressive. He says God will do the teaching there. The inward part is where God works, not where you perform.

So here it is, said directly to you, in a car park with your keys in your hand.

You are known accurately, and the accuracy is not against you. Not one day, not once the burning comes back, not when the third song does what it used to do. Right now, this morning, with a car park in your head and your hands still smelling faintly of the seat cover, you are exactly as visible to God as you were fifteen years ago and He has not revised anything. That is not my kindness. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real person on a real Sunday.

Now, here is the thing I actually want to say, and I want to say it carefully, because you have half suspected it and never had it said back to you.

Your hands going up on their own is not a fraud. It is a habit, and habits are not lies.

The body of a person who has worshipped for fifteen years does things without consulting the emotions, in exactly the way that the body of a person who has loved somebody for fifteen years puts the kettle on for two without deciding to. Nobody would call the second one hypocrisy. It is what love looks like when it has been going long enough to become architecture.

And the mind wandering to a car park is not evidence against you either. It is evidence that you have a mind and it was Sunday.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have not been downgraded, and there is no register anywhere in which a burning fifteen years ago outranks a habit today. The word says God desires truth in the inward parts, and truth is what you are currently holding, which is a person with her hands up and her mind elsewhere and no attempt to pretend otherwise, and it is His Spirit who does the teaching in the hidden part rather than waiting to be impressed by it.

You are not further from Him than you were. You are further from the feeling, and those got confused a long time ago, probably by somebody who meant well.