She Sings It and Cannot Hold It

It is about twenty minutes from the building to her house and the difficulty is always somewhere in the first six.

Up to that point it is fine. There are people in the parking lot and somebody says something kind and she says something back and she means it. Then she is in the car with the engine on and nobody looking, and the whole thing arrives at once, and by the time she is at the second set of lights she is a completely different person from the one who was standing at the front an hour earlier.

She is thirty-eight. She has led worship for nine years and she is good at it and she believes every word she sings. Nobody should read this as a story about somebody faking.

That is exactly the trouble. It would be simpler if she were faking. What actually happens is that she can carry a whole room, genuinely, into a place she cannot get to herself, and then she gets into a car and cannot find one steady inch inside her own chest.

She has never said this to anybody in that building. She has half started twice. Both times she could hear how it would sound, and both times she said something about being tired instead, which is true and is not the thing.

Anybody who has done a good thing for other people and then found nothing left for themselves knows this. And I want to be clear at the start that nobody here is going to be accused of hypocrisy. She is not a fraud. She is a woman who can hand out something real that she cannot at that moment hold, and that is a completely different situation, and it deserves better than a lecture about integrity.

The failing and the portion in one line

Let me put down a line and notice that it does not choose between its two halves.

My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.Psalm 73:26

Both halves are stated flatly. The flesh fails. The heart fails. He does not soften either one, and he does not put them in the past tense, and he does not say they failed until he learned something.

And then, in the same sentence, God is the strength of that same heart. Not instead of the failing. Alongside it. The psalmist has both facts in one breath and does not consider them a contradiction.

You are held by a strength located in God while your own is genuinely failing, and the psalm keeps both in one sentence. That is not a soft word for a woman at a red light. It is what is written in Psalm 73, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written line and puts it into a car six minutes from a building. The failing is real. The portion is God's and it is not affected by the failing.

And the word portion is worth knowing. It is the word for the allotted share a family received in the land, the piece that was theirs by inheritance rather than by performance. He is saying God is his allocated share, and that it is forever, which is a word about duration rather than about how anybody feels on a Sunday afternoon.

You have a portion allotted to you that no drive home has ever reduced. Psalm 73:26 is the text this sits on, and it is the Spirit of God who makes an old psalm land in a woman at the second set of lights.

Nobody here is calling it hypocrisy

Now the part this category exists for, and it goes ahead of everything.

She is not a hypocrite and this article will not imply it. Leading people somewhere you cannot currently stand yourself is not fraud. Every teacher, every parent and every nurse has done a version of it, and it is one of the ordinary shapes of serving other people.

And here is the second thing, which matters as much: a life that looks steady from the outside does not have a smaller ache. Nobody gets to say that a woman in that position should count her blessings. The public part being genuine does not make the private part lighter, and in this case it makes it lonelier, because there is nowhere to take it that does not sound like a confession of something.

A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench.Isaiah 42:3

Smoking flax is a wick that is barely alight and is producing more smoke than light. That is a very exact picture of somebody who can still lead a room and has almost nothing burning in themselves.

You were named in that verse as the thing He specifically does not put out. Isaiah 42:3 is where the word puts it, and it is His Spirit who lets a person be nearly out and not be judged for it.

You are held right now, in this car, six minutes from a room you just carried. It is written that the flesh and the heart fail and God is the strength of the heart and the portion forever, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that true in a woman who has half started this conversation twice and both times said tired.

If any of this ever turns dangerous, and staying safe genuinely comes into question, call or text a crisis line where you live, 988 in the United States, and tell a doctor or a counselor plainly what the drive home is like rather than the version that fits your Sunday. People in serving roles are routinely the last to be asked, and being held by God has never been a reason to go without a real person in the room.