Under the Sound of My Own Praise

The tambourine is still in the bag by the door.

You have not moved it since Sunday. On Sunday it was in your hand and the room was on its feet, and you were the one who took them there. You said the thing that made the drummer sit up. An old woman in the third row put her stick against the pew and stood without it. You remember the exact second the sound turned, and so does everybody in that building.

It is Tuesday afternoon. You are sitting on the kitchen floor with your back against the dishwasher, because a chair felt like too big a decision, and the radio has been off since you came in.

Somebody messages to say Sunday was glory. You send back the flame. You put the phone face down on the linoleum and leave it there.

Here is what nobody in that building knows. The sound on Sunday was real. You were not performing, and that is the part that would break their heads if you ever tried to explain it, which is why you never will. You meant every syllable. And you are further down than any of them have the first idea about. Both of those are true at the same time, in the same woman, in the same week.

They think they have seen the bottom of you. They have seen the top of you at full volume and mistook the volume for depth.

So there is a woman on a kitchen floor at four in the afternoon with the light coming in low across the cupboard doors, and she cannot tell a single person, because the telling would cost them something. It would cost the old woman her third row Sunday. It would cost the drummer his week. It would put a look on the face of the girl who copies how you pray.

And so you sit under the sound of your own praise, which is a strange place to drown, and the strangest part of it is how quiet it is down here.

The deep under the noise

Look at what a worship leader wrote on a day when nobody was watching him lead.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.Psalm 42:7

Read who is saying it. Three verses earlier the same man is remembering how he used to go out with the crowd to the house of God, in front, with the voice of joy and praise. The procession is his. The noise is his. And then in the same psalm the water closes over his head and he writes that down too.

Nobody made him pick one. He does not take back the procession and he does not apologize for the flood. He sets them beside each other and leaves them there.

You are not two women. Psalm 42 keeps the parade and the drowning in one throat and refuses to call either of them the lie, and the Holy Spirit is the one who kept that page for three thousand years so that it would be lying open on a Tuesday afternoon when you needed it.

Now here is the thing this whole message is for, and I am going to say it slowly.

The depth you admit to and the depth you are actually at stopped matching a long time ago. That gap is the ache, and it is not dishonesty. It is mercy misfiring: you shrank the number so the people who love you could sleep. Psalm 139:8 goes all the way down to the lowest place a person can name and finds God already sitting in it, and His Spirit is not working from the figure you gave the prayer chain. You are known at the real one.

And what comes down after a person has never once been calibrated to how strong she is on her best day.

Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear.Isaiah 59:1

Shortened is a measuring word, and Isaiah 59:1 spends it on the arm and not on the one the arm is coming for. That settles the question that has kept you on this floor. It was never whether you could climb back up to where the reach is. It is whether the reach comes down to where you actually are. You have been reached at a depth you have never once described out loud, and the Holy Spirit carried that sentence down here on a Tuesday to tell you so.

There is one more lie in this kitchen and it is the loudest one. It says the praise disqualifies the pain. It says a woman who took a room to its feet on Sunday has used up her claim on being rescued by Tuesday, that she has had her turn, that the whole thing would be embarrassing now.

Hebrews 4:15 hands us a High Priest touched with the feeling of our weakness, and the word adds no clause excluding the ones who lead. You were not disqualified by the volume. The Spirit of God is not embarrassed to find the woman who made the sound lying underneath it.