The Tack Hammer On A Tuesday

The tack hammer is on the shelf in the garage between a tin of screws and a roll of gaffer tape.

It was his father's. Magnetic on one end, so you set the tack on it, place it with your left hand out of the way, and tap. He can still do it without looking. He has not done it for fourteen months and he could still do it now if there were a chair in front of him, and there is, actually, there is a frame in the corner under a dust sheet, a wing back he stripped for a customer and never finished, the webbing half tacked and the hessian folded on the seat where he put it down.

Fourteen months. The shutter came down in the spring before last. The stock went to a fellow who drove down from somewhere up north with a Luton van, and he took the hides and the horsehair and two rolls of good hessian for what it cost to hire the van, and he was perfectly pleasant about it.

His two men found work. One is at a builders' merchant on the trade counter and is happy enough. The other drives, and they still text about the football.

Tuesday is the worst one. Not Monday, which he expected. Tuesday, because Tuesday was cutting and estimating and the phone, and now Tuesday is a day with nothing whatsoever in it at half past nine in the morning.

He stood at the back on Sunday through all four songs with his mouth shut.

That is the bit he cannot get past. He was not angry. He was not having a crisis of anything. He simply opened his mouth on the first line, which was about how good God has been through the year, and nothing came out, because he could not sing it and mean it, and he is not a man who will sing a thing he does not mean. So he shut his mouth and stood there, and his wife noticed, and she put her hand on his back, and she has not said a word about it since, and he loves her for that more than he can tell her.

Fourteen months is long enough that nobody asks about the workshop any more. It has become a thing he used to do.

Maybe that is where you are. Standing at the back with your mouth shut, or in a car park in the middle of a song, or at a sink at home with the radio on and something in you that will not join in.

Nobody here is going to ask you to pretend

Let me get that said before anything else, because it is usually what comes next.

I am not going to ask you to be grateful for what happened. I am not going to suggest that the heaviness is a fault in your faith, or that a man who cannot sing is a man who has slipped somewhere. Scripture is full of people bringing God the true thing rather than the tidy thing, and the ones who did it are not presented as backsliders. They are presented as the honest ones.

You are welcome in that room with your mouth shut, and it is not a concession anybody is making for you. It is what the written word does with heavy people the whole way through the psalms, and the Holy Spirit makes a welcome like that reach a man standing at the back.

And the word, plainly

Abundance is not the trade back.

It is not the shutter going up, it is not a phone that rings on a Tuesday, and it is not money, and I am not going to hold the word loosely so it can do quiet work on a man in a garage. Abundance means fullness of life, and that is all it has ever meant.

I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.John 10:10

You have that at half past nine on a Tuesday with a dust sheet over a wing back frame, and it is not conditional on your ability to sing about it. It is written in John 10 in the Shepherd's own words, and it is the Holy Spirit who gets it into a man who has stopped opening his mouth.

What worship is actually made of

Here is the sentence that changed how I understand this.

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

Pour out your heart. Not tidy it, not sweeten it, not check it against the mood of the room first. Pour it out. And whoever wrote that had clearly seen what was in a heart at the time, and did not think it needed improving before it went anywhere.

That is what worship is made of. Not a feeling and not a volume. A true thing said toward God. A man who manages one honest sentence has worshipped. A man who sings forty lines he does not mean has performed, and he knows it before the last one is out.

You are received when you come with four words and nothing else, and the four words are enough because of who is receiving them. That is the plain claim of Psalm 62, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a man's short honest sentence to the throne rather than the man's own ability to dress it up.

And notice what Isaiah 61 does with praise, because everybody gets this backwards.

the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness.Isaiah 61:3

A garment. Given. Handed to a person, put around their shoulders like a coat around somebody who has been out in it too long. That is not a demand made of the heavy. It is a gift for them, and the whole grammar of the verse runs from God toward the person and never once the other way.

You have not failed at worship for standing there with your mouth shut. Nothing in the written word makes God's welcome of a man conditional on the man's ability to produce a feeling, and the Spirit was given to help in weakness rather than to check on performance.

What to do on Sunday

So this is what I would say to the man at the back.

Do not sing the line that is not true. Your instinct was right about that, and it is not rebellion, it is honesty, and God has never once been served by a person singing something false at Him. But do not go silent altogether either, because silence is not the only alternative and the two of them are not your whole menu.

Find the shortest true thing and say that instead. It might be four words. It might be: You are still God. It might be: You are here and I am not. Say the true short thing while everybody else sings the long one, and understand that heaven does not grade on length.

You are heard when you say four true words in a room full of people singing forty, and you are not at the back of any queue for it. Psalm 62 asks for the heart poured out rather than the heart performed, and His Spirit is the one who carries it, and the shortness of a sentence has never been a measure of how far it gets.