I Went Out To The Car Park

It is the second song and she knows it, and she can feel it coming, and she gets to the line about God making all things new and her mouth keeps moving and nothing comes out of it.

Fourth row, aisle end, because that is where they always sat. Around her people have their hands up and their eyes shut and they mean every word, and she is not being cynical about them, she really is not. They are lovely and they are not pretending. She just cannot make the sound.

Two years. That is the thing about two years: it is long enough that it has stopped being something anybody brings up. The anniversary went past in February and one person messaged and she was grateful and slightly winded. The insurance is not finished and it is not a comfort either; it is a file with a reference number and a woman called Denise who is perfectly nice.

She lives in a rented house the other side of the ring road with magnolia walls and a landlord's sofa and somebody else's curtain poles, and it is fine, and it is not hers, and she has stopped saying that out loud because there is nowhere for it to go.

What went: her father's tools, the whole chest of them, which she had not used and had been going to learn. A box of letters. The door frame in the kitchen with the pencil marks and the dates, which is the one she cannot talk about at all, because you can replace a chest of tools in theory and you cannot replace a line drawn on wood by a man who is also gone.

One thing came out. A stainless steel tape measure of his, in a plastic bag, scorched down one side, handed to her by a firefighter who had no idea what he had in his hand. It is in a kitchen drawer in a house that is not hers, under the bin bags.

The song modulates. Somebody near the front shouts something glad. And she stands there with her mouth moving and thinks, quite calmly: there is nothing honest I can sing right now. So she picks up her bag at the end of the bridge and goes out through the double doors and sits in the car with the keys in her lap until it finishes.

Maybe that is where you are. Maybe you have gone to the car park, or the toilets, or just somewhere behind your own eyes in the fourth row. And maybe the worst part is not the silence. Maybe it is the suspicion that the silence means something about you.

The garment is given, never demanded

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out your heart. Not tidy it, not edit it, not present it. Pour it out, which is what a container does when it is emptied of whatever was actually in it, and the verse adds no note about what the contents ought to be.

And Isaiah puts a garment of praise on a person with a spirit of heaviness. Read the order. The heaviness is already there and is not being told off; the garment goes on over it, and it goes on because somebody else puts it there.

So you are not being asked for a feeling, and you have never once been asked for one. That is what the written word does here: it hands the garment over and leaves the heaviness underneath it without comment, and it is the Holy Spirit who dresses a person who cannot dress herself.

Four words is a whole worship service

Praise that is true is praise. Length does not measure it, volume does not measure it, and neither does how much of the room joins in.

You do not have to sing the line about all things being made new. If it is not true in your mouth this morning, leave it. Sing nothing, or sing the four words in it that are true, or say one sentence with no tune at all. God is here. That is four words and a complete act of worship, and there is not a syllable of pretending in it.

And you are heard, fully, the way the loudest voice in that building is heard. Psalm 62 says pour out your heart and does not grade the contents, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying four honest words to God rather than your ability to project them.

I want to say the other half of that plainly, because it is where people get hurt. Nobody here is going to tell you that heaviness is a door shut from your side. Nobody is going to suggest that if the praise were better the file would close, or that the tape measure is under the bin bags because something in you did not rise.

What fullness looks like on a landlord's sofa

So what is actually here, if it is not the house and not the tools.

It is the return of ordinary feeling. It is the afternoon you catch yourself laughing. It is prayer that stops being a performance review. It is being able to be with people again and to want to. It is sleeping. It is the small astonishing return of wanting anything at all.

You were loved through both of those years, including February, including the Sundays you left early and told nobody. That is not my kindness, it is what is written about how God keeps the mourning, and His Spirit was in the car park before you got to the car.