Three Years Of Sundays And Never In A Seat

A hundred and fifty something Sundays, and she has not once sat in a chair and been sung over.

She is there at half past seven. She sets the stands. She runs it, and then there is the gap where somebody usually needs something, and then it is on, and she is watching the room while she sings, which is a completely different activity from singing, and then at the end there is the packing down and the person who wants to talk about the key.

She loves it. That is not in dispute and it needs saying up front, because half the advice about this assumes a person is secretly resentful and she is not.

But there is a thing she noticed in February and has not been able to put back down. She was at a friend's wedding, in a pew, and the singing started and she had nothing to do. Nothing at all. And about four bars in she started to cry and could not have told anybody why, and she pretended it was the wedding.

It was not the wedding. It was three years of standing up.

You know that gap. Maybe not a platform. Somewhere you are always the one running it, and you have not been on the receiving end of the thing you run for so long that the receiving has started to feel like a foreign country.

Say what three years of standing has cost

Nobody has counted it, so let us.

It has cost her the difference between leading worship and worshipping, which sounds like a small distinction and is not, and which she could describe precisely at half past seven in the morning if anybody ever asked her.

It cost her about a hundred and fifty Sunday afternoons, because the day is not over when the room empties.

And it has cost her something quieter: the ability to be ministered to at all. After three years of running the room she now finds it genuinely difficult to receive anything from anybody in that building, and February in a pew was the first evidence of it, and it frightened her a bit.

You have been giving out for three years with nothing coming back in, and God has never once required you to be on your feet to be near Him. Psalm 23:2 says He makes me lie down in green pastures, and it is His Spirit who takes makes me lie down off a page and puts it in a woman who has not sat down since the year before last. Nothing about His welcome ever depended on the stands being set.

One thing is needful, and it is not the running order

There is one line built for a woman with a set list in her hand.

But one thing is needful: and Mary has chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.Luke 10:42

Sit with the last clause, because it is the one nobody quotes. Which shall not be taken away from her. That is a promise about permanence attached to the choosing of a good part, and it is said over a woman who is doing nothing useful at that moment, in a house where there is work to be done and somebody standing in a doorway doing it.

And notice that the working woman is not condemned. She is called by name and told she is troubled about many things. That is diagnosis rather than accusation, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes it land as diagnosis rather than as one more thing she is failing at.

You have a good part that cannot be taken from you, and it was chosen for you rather than achieved by you. That is not a soft reading of a sharp story. The written word attaches permanence to the sitting down, and the Spirit is the one who makes sitting down available to somebody who has not managed it in three years.

And I want to be plain, because otherwise this article becomes a schedule entry. Rest here is not a discipline you are behind on. Nothing here tells you to step down, take a season off, or have a conversation with anybody about your capacity. If you lead again on Sunday you have failed nothing.

Receiving is a skill and it goes rusty

The fear under this one is unusual and worth naming, because it is not the fear of dropping the ball.

It is the fear of finding out that she cannot receive any more. That she will sit down in a service, deliberately, and nothing will happen, and the four bars in February will turn out to have been a one off, and then she will know something about herself she would rather not know.

You are able to receive today, and the ability was never a muscle you were maintaining. Psalm 23:3 says He restores my soul, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the restoring rather than the one who checks whether she is ready to be restored.

One plain sentence before we go on. If the crying in February has been happening more, or if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you tell anybody on the team. That is not a failure of ministry. That is the shepherding arriving with a face and a phone number, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.