The Shout They Expect From Me

There is a moment about two thirds of the way through and the whole building knows it is coming.

The organ does the thing. The drummer sits up. And somebody, usually the same somebody, looks over at your row.

Because that is when you go.

You have gone at that moment for so many years that people have arranged their Sundays around it. New people get told about you. There is a woman who says she cannot worship properly unless she can hear you behind her, and she means it as the highest compliment anybody could pay.

And for about a year and a half, you have been producing it.

Not faking. I am not going to let you use that word about yourself, and I will explain why in a minute.

Producing. There is a difference. What used to come up out of you like water out of the ground now gets assembled somewhere in your chest about four bars early, and by the time it comes out it is indistinguishable from the real thing to everybody in that building.

Including, on a good week, to you.

Then you get in the car and you know.

Before anything else, hear me.

I am not accusing you of anything.

You have not deceived that room. Every word you have shouted in there is a true word and you have never once shouted something you do not believe. And I am not going to hand you the word hypocrite, because it does not fit and it would flatten something that deserves better.

I am saying I know about the four bars. That is all.

Where the honest version goes

Here is David telling a whole congregation what to do with what is actually in them.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart before him.

Not present your heart. Not offer a curated portion of it. Pour out, which is what you do with a vessel when you want nothing left in it, and it is not a tidy image and it was not meant to be.

And look where it goes. Before him. Not before the congregation. The pouring out in that verse is directed at God, in a psalm sung publicly, which means David is telling a whole room to do something that only one person will actually see.

So here it is, said directly to you, in your own front room with a plate on your knee.

You are invited to pour out rather than to produce. Not one day, not when the fire comes back on its own, not when the four bars are no longer necessary. Right now, on a Sunday afternoon with the game on low, you are one of the ye people in that verse, and the instruction is pour rather than perform. That is not my opinion. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit who takes a written line and lands it on a real woman in a real front room.

Now, why is it being produced?

Because a room got used to you, and you love that room.

The woman behind you is not wrong about what your voice does for her. Whatever else is going on, that part is real. So when the water stopped coming up on its own, you did not stop, because stopping would have taken something from people who are genuinely holding onto it.

That is not sin. That is a woman covering for a dry season out of love for a congregation, and there is nothing dishonorable anywhere in it.

But here is what it costs: there is now no room in your week where the true state of you gets said out loud. The shout occupies the only slot you had.

And hear this, because it is settled rather than pending. You have a refuge that does not require the shout, and it was a refuge through the whole dry year and a half. The word says God is a refuge for us, and a refuge is a place a person goes to rather than a performance a person gives, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real house on a real Sunday afternoon.

You do not have to stop shouting. You have to have somewhere else to be honest, and the two have never once been in competition.