The Woman Who Stopped Singing

She still goes. She wants that on the record before anything else, because she knows exactly how this looks.

She is there every week. Same row, near the front on the left, because that is where she has sat since she was a teenager and the row would feel wrong without her in it. She helps with the coffee afterwards. She asks people about their weeks and she means it.

She just does not sing any more.

Nobody has said anything. She has become good at the small mechanics of it: standing at the right time, holding the words on the screen with her eyes, a face that gives away nothing. Twenty minutes of a room full of people singing about the goodness of God, and a woman in the third row with her mouth shut.

It started after. She went without for that specific thing, more than once, and she meant it as much as she has ever meant anything, and nothing changed. And the first Sunday after the second time, the songs came on and her mouth would not open, and it has not properly opened since.

She has not told a soul. What would she even say? That she is angry? She is not sure that is the word. It is more that singing those particular sentences out loud has started to feel like saying something she cannot currently verify, and she was raised not to say things she cannot verify.

And a friend said, gently, in the car park: maybe fast about it again.

She said maybe. And what she felt was not hope. It was a kind of flat familiarity, and underneath it, further down, something that felt almost like being asked to sing.

If you are standing in a room full of singing with your mouth shut, come and sit down at the end of one of these tables.

Nobody is going to talk you back into it

Let us settle that first, because bracing for it is the natural thing to do at a title like that one.

Nothing on this page is going to coax you into singing. Not with an argument, not with a story about somebody who pushed through, and not with the suggestion that if you would just open your mouth the feeling would follow. Perhaps it would. It is not this page's business, and being managed is the last thing a person in your position needs.

You are not in trouble for the silence, and it has not moved you out of anything. That is not a soft opening in order to get somewhere later. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been standing in that third row for a year and a half and has never once needed your mouth open to know what is in you.

And nothing here will tell you why the thing did not move. Nobody knows why. Anybody who says they do is guessing and calling it faith.

Scripture already has a song about not being able to sing

Here is the part that most people have never noticed, and it is sitting in the middle of the songbook.

How shall we sing the LORD's song in a strange land?Psalm 137:4

Read what that is. It is a song. It is in the collection, with a tune, sung by a congregation, and its subject is a group of people who could not bring themselves to sing.

They had hung their instruments up in the trees. People were asking them for the old songs and they could not do it, and instead of hiding that or being ashamed of it, they wrote it down and it went into Scripture, and it has been read out loud in worship ever since.

You are standing in something God made room for in His own book. I am not saying that to give you permission you did not need: it is the plain fact of what Psalm 137 is and where it sits (Psalm 137:4), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes that a chair to sit in rather than a curiosity.

Nobody wrote a note underneath that psalm explaining what those people had done wrong. It just stands there.

And your going without bought nothing, because nothing was for sale

Here is a thing that needs saying flatly, because it has been feeding the silence.

What you went without did not fail. It was never a mechanism, so failure was not available to it. It did not fall short of a length. It was not spoiled by your motives. It did not nearly work.

You did not do it wrongly, and the outcome is not a report on your faith. Scripture is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), which means He is not a device that yields a result when it is operated properly, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight lifting rather than a point in an argument you would rather not have.

And nobody here is going to promise it will work next time. You would not believe it, and it would not be true.

Now something said in the open here rather than in fine print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.