He Just Said Huh

Dana Whitfield had the biggest voice in the room every Wednesday night and no voice at all on Thursday.

Wednesdays she stood on a six inch riser in a school cafeteria with forty-one children in front of her, doing the hand motions, going up on the high note on purpose because it made the second graders shriek. Nineteen years of it. Kids who sang with her at seven were bringing their own kids now. In that room she was the loudest, gladdest, least embarrassed woman alive.

Thursdays she sat behind the front desk at a dental office on Route 12 and said nothing at all.

Not because anybody stopped her. Nobody there was unkind. The subject would simply come near, the way it does over a countertop, and Dana would go smooth and pleasant and slightly deaf. "Big weekend?" "Oh, not much." Nineteen years of not much.

She was not ashamed of Jesus. That was the confusing part. She would have told you plainly, alone in the car, that He got hold of her at twenty-two in a laundromat on a Tuesday afternoon and she had never once gotten over it. She simply had a room where that was sayable and a room where it was not, and the wall between them had stood so long she had stopped noticing it was a wall.

Then a Thursday in October, coming down in sheets outside.

Man in the third chair by the window, seventy-something, waiting on a crown. Ed. He had a folded newspaper he was not reading. He watched her a while, and then he said, "You sing, don't you."

Dana's mouth went dry.

"My granddaughter's in that Wednesday thing at the school. She sings your songs in the back of my truck the whole way home. She does the hands."

And there it was. The doorway, wide open, with a nice old man standing in it holding it for her.

She had a sentence ready. She had had it ready for nineteen years. Yeah, a little, and a laugh, and then something about the weather, and the door closes so quietly that nobody in the room hears it shut.

The rain hit the window behind him.

And Dana Whitfield put both hands flat on the counter and said, "I do. I sing because Jesus got hold of me when I was twenty-two and I have never once gotten over it."

Then she stopped. She did not explain it. She did not soften it, or make a joke to give him a way out, or add anyway, that's just me.

Ed looked at her for a second.

"Huh," he said.

And the hygienist called his name and he got up and went, and the rain kept doing what rain does, and the phone rang, and Dana answered it with her voice shaking so badly she had to say the name of the practice twice.

Nothing happened.

And everything did. Because there was a wall in that woman's life nineteen years old, and at a quarter past ten on a Thursday morning she put one true sentence straight through it, and a wall with a hole in it is not a wall any more.

The only credential in the verse

Psalm 107 opens by rounding up everybody God has ever pulled out of anything, and its second line is an instruction so plain it is almost funny.

Let the redeemed of the LORD say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy.Psalm 107:2

Not let the redeemed feel so. Not let the redeemed be certain. Not let the well spoken redeemed, the ones with a tidy story and an answer ready for the follow up, say so. Say so. Out loud. That is the entire instruction.

And look at the qualification, because it is the only one in the sentence. The redeemed. Not the articulate. Not the brave. The single credential is what was done to you, and Somebody else did it, which means you did not have to earn it and nobody can revoke it.

You are one of the redeemed. That is not a compliment I am paying you, it is a description of a transaction that has already closed. The written word says He redeemed you from the hand of the enemy, past tense, finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness to it inside a person who cannot always feel it.

Then the psalm does something worth watching. It gathers four groups: people who wandered in a wilderness, people who sat in darkness, people afflicted by their own foolishness, sailors caught in a storm that took them to the bottom and brought them up again. Four rescues, nothing alike. And after each one the same line comes back around, oh that men would praise the LORD for his goodness. It is a room where people take turns saying what happened to them.

Nobody in that room is asked how long they waited before they spoke.

Let that land, because you have been keeping a private accounting. Nineteen years, or thirty, or since you were fifteen. The verdict you have passed on yourself for staying quiet that long has no right to stay in you. I am not being generous with you. Scripture says there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and there is no clause in it about the years, and the Spirit who lives in you has never once opened that file.

Your silence was not cowardice. Most of the time it is arithmetic done fast: this room is safe, that one is not, and I would rather be quiet than careless with something I love. That is not a sin. That is a person guarding something valuable, and God is not offended at being guarded.

But you have felt what it costs. A faith kept only where it is easy slowly starts to feel like a hobby, and you know perfectly well it is not one.

So here is what the psalm hands you. You have a sentence in you already. It is short, it is true, and it does not need a defense. That is not a technique of mine. The written word says the redeemed are the ones who say so, and the Spirit is the one who takes an ordinary sentence out of an ordinary mouth and lands it somewhere the speaker cannot see.

Because notice what Dana was actually afraid of. Not the sentence. The one after it. The follow up, the argument, the question she would have no answer for. Nineteen years of quiet to avoid a conversation nobody ever forced her to have.

You are not on the hook for the outcome of what you say. You never were. Scripture says God's word does not return to Him empty, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it after it leaves your mouth, which means the sentence is yours and everything downstream of it is His.

Say so, and then stop. That is allowed. More than allowed, it is the shape of the thing.