Ninety Seconds In The Side Aisle

Wendell Pike ran the sound desk at that church for eleven years, and now he sits in row nine and cannot sing a word.

Not because anything went wrong. That is the part he has trouble explaining, even to himself. They put up the new building, and the new building came with a system four times the size of the old one, and about the same time his shifts at the water plant moved to a rotation that ate two Sundays a month. So he trained three kids on the old desk, and then the kids trained on the new one, and one spring he simply stopped being on the list. Nobody pushed him. Nobody so much as hinted. He stepped back with both hands, on purpose, and he would do it again.

He just did not know what he would do with his hands afterward.

So here is what Wendell does now, every single Sunday, in row nine.

He grades the mix.

The lead vocal is two decibels hot and has been since March. The kick is boxy because that room has a hard back wall. There is a rattle in the left hang that shows up on the low B and only on the low B. He has an entire set of notes running the whole service, precise and unwritten and delivered to nobody, and he could not tell you one line they sang.

He would never say a word of it to a soul. He is not that man. The kids are doing well and he is proud of them and he means it.

But the notes are the only thing that still makes him feel like he is on the desk.

The rest of the time he is a name on a roll in a building.

Then a Sunday in May, and he is edging out along the side aisle with his keys already in his hand, and a kid steps in front of him. Sixteen, maybe. Long arms, church shirt untucked on one side, and a coiled cable over his shoulder.

"Are you Wendell?"

"I am."

"Marcus said you'd know. This one's got a crackle and I've swapped it out three times and it's still there and I can't find it."

Wendell took the cable. He ran his thumb up to the connector and flexed it, and listened to it the way you listen to an engine, and he found it in about four seconds.

"It's not the cable," he said. "It's right here at the strain relief. Somebody's solder joint let go. Bring me an iron next week and I'll show you how to read one, because once you know what that feels like under your thumb you'll never chase it around a room again."

The kid said, "Seriously?" like Wendell had handed him a car.

Ninety seconds. Maybe a hundred.

Wendell got out to the parking lot and sat in his truck and did not put the key in, because it had just hit him that the last ninety seconds were the most used he had felt in a year, and nobody saw it happen, and he did not need anybody to.

The next Sunday he came forty minutes early. He went to the cable box behind the stage and pulled every one of them, tested them, flexed the ends, marked two with tape and coiled the rest properly, over and under, the way you do it if you want them to last.

Then he went and sat in row nine.

He never told a living soul. And for the first time in three years he sang the whole way through, badly, and did not hear the kick drum once.

Ye are God's building

Paul is writing to a church that had gotten very busy sorting itself out by whose team a person was on, and his answer is one short sentence with three parts, and not one of them is a position.

For we are labourers together with God: ye are God's husbandry, ye are God's building.1 Corinthians 3:9

Read the middle of it first. Together with God. The togetherness Paul names is not first with each other, it is with Him, which quietly takes every ladder in the room and lays it on the ground.

Then watch what he does next, because it is the turn the whole verse is built on. He has just called them the workers. In the same breath he calls them the field, and then the house. You are the crew and you are also the thing being built, which means your presence in that room is not attendance. It is material.

You are not an attender of that body. You are part of it, and what you are carrying is needed there. That is not encouragement I am inventing for a hard Sunday. The written word says ye are God's building, present tense, already, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets each member in the body as it pleases Him and does not consult a roster to do it.

Here is the difference nobody tells you when you step back from something.

On a platform you are visible. In a building you are structural. Visible has applause attached to it and structural does not, and the reason a person aches when the visible ends is not vanity. It is that visible is measurable. You could tell, week to week, that you were doing something, because there was a desk in front of you and a room behind you and a moment when the thing either worked or did not.

Structural is silent. Nobody claps for a footing.

So the ache is honest and it is not a sin. But it has been reading you a wrong verdict.

The idea that you would not be missed has no right to stay in your chest. Scripture says the members which seem to be more feeble are necessary, and it says the parts nobody looks at get the greater honor, and the Holy Spirit is the one who wrote that through Paul specifically so nobody in that room could rank the room.

And let me be plain about what this is not.

This is not a case against the people who have it now. They are doing it well. The ones who handed it over did it kindly, or you would have said so by now, and none of this is an accusation waiting for a hearing. Nobody wronged you, and there is nothing to take back.

It is also not about getting the desk again. It may come back to you and it may not, and either way that was never the thing that actually went missing.

What went missing was your hands.

You were built into that house by God Himself, and you were not slotted in as a spare. The written word says He hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased him, and the Spirit does not put a person in a room and then have nothing for them to do in it.

So the notes running in your head every Sunday are not the problem to solve. They are a good man's skill with nowhere to go. Skill with nowhere to go turns into commentary every time, and it happens to the finest people alive.

This is yours: real work in that house this week, unasked and unseen, and it counts the same as anything you ever did with a room watching. Scripture says whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord, and not unto men, and the Spirit is the one who receives it long before anybody else notices it was done.