I Wanted A Voice That Could Sing

Sunday afternoon and the house has emptied out and she is doing the pans, which she prefers to do alone and everybody has learned to let her.

It was a good table. Nine of them. Her son-in-law telling the story he tells with the same three mistakes in it that she has stopped correcting. The little one under the table with the dog, both of them entirely certain they were getting away with something.

And this morning, like every Sunday morning of her entire life, she stood in a congregation and moved her mouth.

She cannot sing. Not in the way people mean when they say that about themselves at parties. Actually cannot. It was established when she was eleven by a teacher who was not cruel and who was, unfortunately, entirely correct, and she has known ever since.

Fifty-seven years of standing in rooms full of people doing a thing she cannot do.

She loves the singing. That is what nobody would guess. She knows every one of those hymns and she knows which verse is the good one in each and she can tell you which line in the third verse of one particular hymn has undone her since she was thirty-one.

And she stands there with her mouth moving and no sound in it, and she has never said one word about any of this to a living soul in fifty-seven years, because there is no way to say it that does not sound like a woman fishing for a compliment, and because at some point the wanting stopped being a childhood thing and became simply the shape of her, and you do not announce your own shape at a coffee hour.

Plainly, what this is not

Let me get it said, because you have pans to do and no patience for a runaround.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is no compensating thing arriving at the end, no list, no paragraph that explains what God gave you in place of it and expects you to be cheered up. That would be a page telling you what you are, and that is not something this site does.

And it is not going to tell you the voice is coming. I have no idea and neither does anybody else, and a woman of sixty-eight does not need somebody promising her something on God's behalf.

You are not being handled, and there is no trade being arranged here. That is not caution on my part. Scripture is what handles this, in a conversation at a burning bush, and the Holy Spirit has never once required a woman to be reconciled to a substitute before He would speak to her.

God asks Moses a question about mouths

Here is the exchange, and it is worth reading slowly because everybody remembers Moses' half and forgets God's.

Moses has been told to go and speak, and he says the honest thing, which is that he cannot.

And the LORD said unto him, Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?Exodus 4:11

That is not a rebuke and it is not an explanation.

It is a question about who did the making, asked back to a man who has just described a limitation as though it were an accident that needed working around.

And notice what God does not do. He does not say Moses is wrong about himself. He does not say you can speak fine. He accepts the description entirely and moves the question to who made him that way.

You have been made deliberately by somebody who claims that making as His own work, and the thing you cannot do was never an oversight He is being asked to explain. I am not stretching that. Exodus 4:11 has God name the making as His without a word of apology in it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lets it come to rest in a woman at a sink on a Sunday afternoon.

What He does not say

But I want to say the other half, because the verse gets used badly.

That question does not mean the wanting is wrong. God does not tell Moses to stop minding. He does not correct the feeling. He answers the objection and then, three verses later, gives Moses Aaron, which is a practical accommodation of the exact limitation He has just claimed as His own work.

So both things are held in the same conversation without any strain. He made him that way on purpose, and He does something about the difficulty, and neither cancels the other.

Which means you are not required to arrive at a place where you do not mind. Fifty-seven years of minding is not fifty-seven years of failing.

You have not been ungrateful for a lifetime, you have been carrying a longing about something real, and the word never once asks a person to stop minding as a condition of anything. The passage holds the making and the accommodation in the same page, and the Spirit who searches all things has been standing in that congregation next to you every Sunday for fifty-seven years.

Handing it over is not renouncing it

So here is the action, and I want to be exact, because the wrong version of this is cruel and gets preached often.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it. That is not true and it will not last a week.

It is not deciding it will never come. Neither of us knows that.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, in your own voice, in a kitchen, and putting it into His hands instead of holding it. Which means it stops being the private thing you administer every Sunday morning and starts being something He is carrying, and what He does with it is entirely His.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture does not ask a person to talk herself out of a longing before she can hand it over. The word has Moses state his limitation baldly and be answered rather than corrected, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to feel differently first.