The Power Went Out On The Third Song

Renata Cobb had sung the third song of that set eleven Sundays running, and she could have sung it in her sleep.

She knew the breath before the second line, where the key lifted, which side of the room got loud on the tag. She could sing the whole thing with her eyes shut, and for five months she had, because with her eyes shut nobody could see that she was not in it.

March was when she caught herself.

Nothing happened in March. No funeral, no fight, no crisis a person could point at. She was standing in the fourth row with her hands at her sides singing "You are worth it all," and somewhere in the back half of that line she was deciding between the chicken and the pot roast. The verse came out clean, in tune, and completely empty, the way a song comes out of a woman who learned it at six.

She drove home and could not put the question down. Had she ever meant any of it, or had she only ever known it?

Twenty-three years in that building. Her father set out the chairs on Saturday nights, and she had fallen asleep to the sound of that room when she was small enough to lie across two seats. She loved those people and was not ashamed of a minute of it. She simply could not tell you whether one word of it was hers.

So she started watching herself sing, which is a terrible way to spend a Sunday.

Then, the storm in August.

The power went out at 10:40, right at the front edge of the third song. Screens black. Band cut off in the middle of a bar. Four hundred people in a room lit by the little green panel over the doors and one gray square of window on the left side.

Nobody moved for four seconds.

Then a man near the back kept singing. No instrument, no microphone, nothing to follow. The room came in under him ragged, half a beat behind, everybody working from whatever they had in them.

Her mouth held every syllable. That was the trouble.

But in the dark, with no track underneath it and no screen in front of it, the line arrived at her one word at a time, at the speed a person actually talks.

You. Are. Worth. It. All.

And she stopped singing.

Right there, in a dark room full of people, because for the first time in her life she heard the sentence as a sentence, and she could not sing a thing she was not sure she had ever said.

Then she said it. Not sung. Said, out loud, under the noise, where nobody on earth could have picked it out.

"You are worth it all. I mean that. I have never once said it, and I mean it."

The lights came back at 10:47. Screens up, band in, second half of the set, and the room lifted like nothing had happened, because as far as the room knew nothing had. One woman in the fourth row had crossed over in the dark, and the light came back on a different person, and the songs were the same songs.

They had always been good songs. She had just never been inside one.

The two days after the report

There is a town in John's Gospel that comes to Jesus twice in three days, and it is the second time I want you to see.

A woman meets Him at a well at noon and runs back into town telling everyone, and they come out to Him on her word. On her word. She is the reason that whole place is standing in the field at all, and nothing in the passage takes an ounce off her for it. Then Jesus stays two days, and at the end of the two days the town says this:

Now we believe, not because of thy saying: for we have heard him ourselves, and know that this is indeed the Christ, the Saviour of the world.John 4:42

Hear what that is not saying. Not that she was wrong, not that her word was cheap, not that the days they spent believing on her report were wasted. Her report was true the whole time, and it got a town up off its porches, which is more than most sermons manage.

It is saying something better. They had it on report, and then they had Him in the room. That is what the two days were for. Not correction. Contact.

And you are not late to this. You are standing exactly where those people stood on the first afternoon, holding something true that reached you in somebody else's voice, and He is already staying at your house. That is not my encouragement laid over your week. The written word says He abode there two days, and the Holy Spirit who carried Him into that town is the one who has kept this question alive in you since March instead of letting you put it down.

Nobody in that town was scolded for arriving on hearsay, and hearsay is how nearly everybody gets there. Somebody sang it over you in a kitchen, or sat you in a row of chairs, or prayed over you when you were four. That is not a defect in your faith. That is mercy with a face on it, and it worked.

But a well described to you is not the same as water in your own mouth, and you have known the difference since March. You have heard Him yourself already, more than once, and you were not imagining it. Scripture says His sheep hear His voice and He calls them by name, one at a time, and the Spirit does not route that voice through a committee. It is your own name He says.

Now the part that takes the audit out of your hands.

Those Samaritans did not arrive at "we have heard him ourselves" by examining their own sincerity. They spent two days in the company of Jesus, and the question answered itself from the outside in.

You have been doing the opposite, and it is exhausting. You have been standing in the fourth row with a clipboard, checking your own chest for warmth while the singing goes on around you. Sincerity is a terrible thing to audit. Look straight at it and it hides.

You were being honest, and nobody ever handed you a better instrument than that clipboard. So set it down and take this instead.

The question asking whether you have ever meant a word of it has no right to stay in your chest. It never had the standing. I did not invent that to be kind. Scripture says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who bears witness with your spirit that you belong to God, so the verdict you keep trying to reach on yourself was reached long ago by Someone with the authority to reach it.

And let me stop speaking about a woman in the fourth row, because she is you. You know the song. You know the breath mark before the second line. You know exactly how it feels to sing something beautiful out of your mouth while a quiet voice underneath asks whether you are worshiping or performing a memory.

So hear this. This is yours. Not on its way to becoming yours, not under review, not waiting on a feeling to arrive on schedule. Yours. The written word says whoever comes to Him He will in no wise cast out, and the Spirit living in you is not a rumor handed along a row of chairs. He is a Person, and He is in the room where you are standing.