I Miss The Sound Of A Full Room

Nine chairs, and she loves all nine of them, and she wants that in the first line because everything after it is going to sound like something else.

She knows their names. She knows what Dennis is carrying and she knows about the thing with Rachel's son, and last month she sat on a kitchen floor with one of them for two hours, which in six years at the other place never once happened to her.

She is not sorry she is here.

The trouble is the singing.

At the other place there were six hundred. On a good Sunday, in the second song, when the room got hold of it, there was a sound in that building that she has not been able to describe to anybody since, and she has tried twice and given up both times.

It was not the band. She wants that understood too. It was six hundred people, most of them not good singers, making a noise together that no one of them could have made.

Here it is nine people and a guitar and a woman called Val who is genuinely half a tone under and has been for years.

And in the first song, most weeks, at about the third line, something goes in her chest and she stops singing for a moment and looks at the floor and then joins back in.

She has never said this to anybody in that room. She cannot think of a way to say it that would not land as an insult on nine people she loves.

They wept and they shouted, and nobody was corrected

Sit down in one of those nine chairs, because there is a scene in Ezra that has your exact Sunday in it, and Scripture records it without telling anybody in the room to stop.

The foundation of the second temple is laid. There is a shout. And then this.

But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy.Ezra 3:12

Wept with a loud voice. And many shouted aloud for joy.

At the same moment. In the same room. About the same event.

And read what happens next in that chapter: the noise of the weeping and the noise of the shouting could not be told apart, and the sound was heard a long way off.

Nobody is corrected. The old men are not told they are being disloyal to the new work. The young men are not told they are being shallow. Both noises are recorded, both are real, and the thing that carried a long way off was the two of them together.

Hear this in the first song. You are not being disloyal, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the weeping and the shouting in one room and calls the mixture the sound that traveled, and the Holy Spirit is the one who was over that foundation and is in a room of nine with a guitar.

Now let me name what you are actually grieving, because you have been calling it the singing and it is not quite that.

You are grieving being carried, and nothing written in Scripture calls that a fault, and the Holy Spirit is in the grief as much as in the singing.

In a room of six hundred, a person can be swept along. You do not have to hold the note or find the pitch or start the line; the room does it, and on a week when you are empty you can open your mouth and be carried by a sound you are barely contributing to.

In a room of nine you are audible. Every week. Val is half a tone under and everybody can hear it, and everybody can hear you too, and there is nowhere in that room to be carried except by the Holy Spirit, which is exactly what the written word says is happening there.

That is a real loss and it is not a small one, and it has nothing to do with loving those nine people.

Hear this too, and let it stop the hiding. You are not required to choose, and Scripture is what says so. What is written lets a man weep for the first house and rejoice over the second in the same breath, and the Spirit of God has never asked anybody to be finished grieving before they are allowed to be glad.

And now the thing this site will always say plainly. Six hundred was not worse and it was not better. That building is not a compromise and this room is not a purer form of anything, and there is no ladder here with the small room at the top of it. Two real things, both good, and you have lost access to one of them, and that is allowed to hurt.