I Sing It And I Never Say It

She sings alto, second row, third from the left, and she has done for nine years.

Which means she has sung, out loud, in a room with two hundred people in it, in a voice that carries, some of the most enormous claims a human being can make. She has sung them on Sundays and at three funerals and once, memorably, at four in the afternoon in an empty building while a man tested a cable.

She knows about a hundred of them by heart. She does not need the screen and has not for years.

And she has never spoken a single line of any of it.

Not to her sister, who asks her fairly directly about once a year and gets a warm, slightly musical non-answer. Not to the man at work who told her about his divorce for forty minutes and then asked her, at the end, in an unguarded way, what keeps you going. Not out loud on her own in a car.

She is forty-one.

She has thought about it properly, which is why she can tell you exactly where the line is. It is not the words. She can say the words. She has proved this: she has read a line of a hymn out loud off a page in an empty kitchen and nothing whatever happened in her.

It is when the words are hers and there is no tune underneath them.

Because a tune is doing something. A tune says: this is a thing being sung. It puts a small frame around the claim, and inside that frame it is not exactly a personal statement, it is a piece being performed, and everybody in the room including her can hold it either way.

Take the tune away and there is a woman in a room saying a thing about herself, and she has never once done it.

The covering was doing real work

I want to begin by defending the tune, because you are half expecting me to accuse it and it does not deserve that.

Music is not a hiding place by nature. It is one of the ways God has given human beings to say things too large for ordinary speech, and it has been doing that job in Scripture from Exodus onward, and there are things you have sung on a Sunday that could not have been said in any other register without sounding absurd.

The tune is not the problem. The tune is a genuine good, and nine years of singing it out loud in a voice that carries has been real, and I am not going to take that off you in order to make a point.

What we are looking at is a frame, and what the frame has quietly permitted.

You said it exactly: inside the frame it is not precisely a personal statement, and everybody including you can hold it either way. That is true. And a woman who has held it either way for nine years has never had to find out which way she holds it.

Now here is what God does about a mouth.

And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise unto our God: many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust in the LORD.Psalm 40:3

I want you to notice where He puts it. Not in the air. Not in the assembly. In my mouth.

David is describing something placed in a person, in the organ they speak with, and the singing and the saying are not separated anywhere in that verse. The new song is located in a mouth and it belongs to the one whose mouth it is.

You have a new song put in your mouth by God, and He put it there rather than into a room, and that is not encouragement for a woman in the second row, it is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing on the frame rather than on a psalm you have very possibly sung.

And notice what comes next in the verse: many shall see it. Not hear it. See. The visible effect on a life, which is the part of your account that is already unambiguous and has been for nine years.

Now let me say something about the man at work.

He told you about his divorce for forty minutes and then asked, unguarded, what keeps you going.

You had, at that moment, a hundred of the largest sentences in the English language in your memory, and none of them came out, because there was no tune under them.

You are not a coward and you did not fail that man. Scripture says the song was put in your mouth and the Spirit of God is the one who put it there, and a woman who has sung it at three funerals in a voice that carries is not somebody who hides.

But there is a thing you have never done and it costs you moments like that one, and it will keep costing them, and today is the day it ends, and it ends with nobody in the room.

You have a new song put in your mouth by God, and He put it in a person rather than into a room. Scripture says many shall see it, which is the part of your life that has been unambiguous for nine years, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it there.