The Line in the Hymn She Skips

She still sings. That is what makes it invisible.

Third row of the choir, second from the end, same place for twenty six years. She sings the verses, she sings the descant when they need it, she sings the parts nobody likes. There is exactly one line, in one hymn, that they do about four times a year, and when it comes she takes a breath in and lets it out through her nose and comes back in on the next phrase.

Nobody has noticed. Choirs are loud and there are nineteen of them and one woman not singing four words is not something a room can hear.

It is the line about meeting in the morning.

Her daughter died at thirty one. Two years in April. And it is not that she stopped believing the line, which is what a person might assume. It is worse and more particular than that. She cannot sing it because when she sings it something rises in her that she is not able to be standing up in public for, and she found that out the hard way one Sunday and has never risked it again.

So she has built a small piece of machinery: breathe in, out through the nose, back in on the next phrase. Four times a year. Twenty six years in that row and she has become a woman with a technique.

She has told nobody in that choir. She would not know how to start, and there is a part of her that suspects she would be told something about faith.

The strange thing is that she is not avoiding the subject anywhere else. She talks about her daughter. She says her name at the dinner table and in the car and to the woman at the pharmacy who asks after the family. It is four words in a hymn, four times a year, and nothing else in her life has been fenced off like that.

Sit down in the empty loft for a minute. Nobody is going to ask you to sing it.

A king said it about his own child

There is a place in Scripture where a father says the thing your hymn says, and he says it about his own dead child, and he says it in the worst week of his life.

But now he is dead. Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me.2 Samuel 12:23

That is David, on the floor, after seven days of not eating. The servants are frightened to tell him the child has died because they think he will do something drastic, and instead he gets up and washes and eats, and when they ask him why he explains it in that sentence.

Look at what he does and does not claim. He does not describe where the child is. He does not report a vision or a message. He says one thing: I shall go to him.

That is the whole content of it, and it has held for three thousand years because it does not overreach. A grieving father states the direction of travel and stops.

So take it in the loft. You are permitted the same sentence he was, and 2 Samuel 12:23 is where it stands written, and the Spirit kept a bereaved man's plain words in the book instead of tidying them into something more impressive.

Why the line does that to you

Now the mechanism, because it has been filed in you as a failure and it is not one.

Singing is not the same as speaking. It uses breath, it uses the body, it holds a note long enough for something to catch up with it, and it is one of the few things human beings do that reliably opens a person who has decided to stay closed. That is why it is used in worship and it is why it is used at funerals, and it is why one line in one hymn can do to you in four words what two years of sermons have not.

That is not weakness. It is the instrument working as designed.

You are not failing at that line. Nothing written anywhere makes the ability to sing something the measure of whether you believe it, and the Spirit is not standing in the third row taking attendance on your mouth.

And here is the part that will be strange to hear. What rises in you when that line comes is not doubt. Doubt does not do that. Doubt makes a person bored or careful; it does not put pressure behind the eyes. What rises there is the fact that you believe it, meeting the fact that she is not here, and those two things arriving in the same four seconds is more than a woman can hold standing up in front of a congregation.

The line is doing to you exactly what it was written to do. It is just doing it in public.

And there is a mercy hidden in that, though it will not feel like one on a Sunday. A grief that still moves is a grief that has somewhere to go. The people to be concerned about are the ones for whom nothing rises at all any more, and that is not you. You are still able to be reached by four words, two years on, which means the part of you that loved her has not shut down to protect itself. Nothing written anywhere treats that as a defect, and the Spirit is the one who keeps a heart soft enough to be moved rather than hardening it for convenience.

Permission, and one practical thing

Here is the practical part and it is not a demand.

You can keep the technique. There is no requirement anywhere that a grieving woman must sing every word in front of nineteen people, and a technique that lets you stay in the room is a legitimate thing to own rather than a sin to confess.

But sing it somewhere. In the car, in the kitchen, in the empty loft on a Thursday when the building is cold and there is nobody in it. Sing the four words and let whatever happens happen with nobody watching.

You have every right to that line in private. It stands written that God gives songs in the night, and the Spirit does not require an audience or a good performance before He will meet somebody in one.

And you might tell one person in that choir. Not the whole row. One. Because two years of a private technique is a long time to carry a small thing alone, and the woman beside you has almost certainly got one of her own.