The Hymn Kept Going Without the Organ

The power went out at eleven minutes past eleven, in the middle of the third verse.

The keyboard died first, mid chord. Then the ceiling lights, then the little red standby light on the amplifier, and the hall went the color of the weather outside. Forty five people in a room with high windows and a radiator that has never worked.

The singing did not stop.

Nobody decided that. There was no brave moment where somebody called out to carry on. The organ simply fell out from under the line, and the line kept walking. Forty five ordinary voices holding a tune with nothing underneath it but each other, a good semitone flat by the end, and not one person caring, out through the last verse and into the amen.

Marguerite was standing three rows from the back with her arms folded over her cardigan, and halfway through that unaccompanied verse the hair went up on her forearms, the way it has since she was seven years old.

And she began, immediately, to explain it away. She always does.

She knows that hymn the way she knows her mother's step on a stair. She has read enough to know what a minor key does to a nervous system. For eleven years she has carried one quiet suspicion about herself: that whatever moves her in that building would move anybody, and that she was raised inside the sound of it and has been mistaking the sound for God.

Goosebumps are cheap, after all. A film can get them. A crowd can get them.

Except that this time, for ninety seconds in a dark hall, there was no music at all. No organ. No swell. No key change, no reverb off the desk, nobody to follow. Forty five flat voices and a cold radiator.

It happened anyway.

She stood there with her arms folded and her eyes stinging and thought, clear as anything: that was not the tune. There is no tune.

You have been standing in that hall too. Maybe not in the dark, but in the doubt, testing your own arms for eleven years, or fifteen, or thirty. Sit with me a while. I want to tell you what that is.

The longing is in the verse, and it is in the body

Let me say the low part first. You will not trust the lift if I walk straight past the pit.

It is not that you have stopped believing. It is quieter than that, and worse. You can still sing every word. You know when to stand. You would defend that room to anybody who spoke against it, and you love the people in it. And under all of that runs one sentence you have never said out loud in anybody's car on the way home: I cannot tell whether any of this is mine, or whether I am only very good at something I was taught at four years old.

The cruelest part is that every warm thing that happens to you gets filed as evidence against you. Your arms go up, and instead of receiving it you interrogate it. That is not coldness. That is somebody who wants the real thing so badly they will not be comforted by a counterfeit, and I want you to hear the love sitting inside that refusal before anybody calls it doubt.

Come and stand next to David a moment. He is out in a wilderness with no building, no musicians, no congregation, and this is what comes out of him.

O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is.Psalm 63:1

Look where he puts it. My soul, and then my flesh. Not only the part of him that thinks about God, but the part of him that has a pulse, gets thirsty, and cannot be reasoned with. The longing in David sits in his body, and the written word records it with no apology whatsoever, in a place where there is not an instrument for miles.

So here is the first true thing, and it is not my encouragement over you, it is His. You are not being fooled by a chord change. The pull you felt in that dark hall, with nothing under it, is the same pull Scripture puts in the mouth of a man in a dry land where there is no water, and the Holy Spirit is the one who set it in you both. Your own body is not the prosecution's witness against you. It is in the verse.

I know what you do with that, because you have been doing it for eleven years. A thirst is not proof of water, you will say. People long for all kinds of things that are not there.

That is honest, and it deserves an honest answer. A thirst has never proved there is water in the room. What a thirst proves is that you were built to drink. Nobody works one up on purpose, and a hollow points at the shape that fits it.

And you have a drawing on you that you did not start. Jesus said no one comes to Him except the Father draws him, John 6:44, and drawing is a word for work being done by somebody else while you stand there arguing about whether the work is real. That ache you keep putting on trial is the fingerprint of the One you are trying to find, and His Spirit does not leave fingerprints on a house He has never been inside.

Now let me be careful, because there is a cheap version of this message and you are not getting it from me. What was handed to you was real. The woman who taught you that hymn was not passing on a rumor, and the row you grew up in gave you the very words you are still using tonight to argue with God.

You were handed something true, and now the same God is offering you the same thing in your own name, in your own mouth, in your own body. That is not a replacement for what your people gave you. It is the thing they were reaching for when they gave it. Paul told a crowd of strangers that God set them where they are so that they might feel after Him and find Him, though He is not far from any one of us, Acts 17:27, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been doing the not being far. Feeling after Him is exactly what you have been doing for eleven years while calling it failure.

Two things have to settle before any of this is any use, and neither one of them is your doing. The first is that a person can actually know, and not merely hope. The second is closer to the bone: that this is available to you, personally, and not only to the people in that room who seem so untroubled by any of it.

So hear this one slowly. You are not the only witness in this case, and you were never the qualified one. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, Romans 8:16, and that is two witnesses standing where you have spent eleven years counting one and finding it unreliable. One of those two is not yours to produce, cannot be faked by an organ, and has been testifying quietly through every year you spent writing down the evidence against yourself.