The Line I Cannot Sing

Number two hundred and twelve. Fourth line of the third verse.

She has sung in that congregation for fifty years and she can tell you which pew every family sat in going back to the sixties. She sings alto. She has sung alto since she was fifteen and she has never once needed the book.

And nine years ago, in the middle of a perfectly ordinary Sunday, she went quiet in the fourth line of the third verse.

It has happened every single time since. The hymn comes round three or four times a year, and she is fine through the first two verses, and then the line arrives and her throat closes and nothing comes out and she stands there with her mouth still shaped like the word.

Nobody has ever noticed. That is not a small thing to say either. Fifty years, and she is quite certain nobody has ever noticed, which means that for nine years she has been having the most private experience possible in a room with a hundred and forty people in it.

Now here is the important part. She is not confused about whether she is forgiven. She settled that a long time before the throat started. She could tell you the verse. She has told other people the verse and watched it help them.

But nine years is a long time, and somewhere in there she started doing arithmetic. If it were dealt with, it would not still do this. Something that is finished does not put a hand on your throat at eleven twenty on a Sunday morning three times a year. So either the doctrine is wrong or she never really received it, and she is far too sensible to think the doctrine is wrong.

Maybe you have a fourth line. It might be a hymn, or a road, or a name that comes up in conversation, or one photograph in a box you go around. Something reaches for you in the same place every time, and you have stopped reading it as a feeling and started reading it as a finding.

Sit down over here with the pie. There is nothing coming that will tell you the throat is nothing.

What your throat is not qualified to decide

My grandmother would have put this in about eleven words and I am going to take a few more.

There is what is legally true about a person and there is what her body does. Those are two different things and they are allowed to disagree for years without either one moving the other. The verdict was handed down in a court. The catch in the throat happens in a neck. A neck was never on the bench.

He will again have compassion on us; He will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea.Micah 7:19

Into the depths of the sea. Not into a shallow place where a person can wade back out and check on it. You are standing on something that was thrown into deep water a long time ago, and Micah 7 is where that is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who reports on where a thing went and not a Sunday morning in March.

And notice what that verse does not promise. It does not say you will stop being able to feel where it used to be. Scripture is full of pardon and it is remarkably quiet about timetables for how a pardoned body behaves afterward. You have been holding God to a promise He never made, and the promise He did make is written down and is about the sins and not about your throat, and His Spirit is the one who keeps you reading the actual sentence.

Nine years is not evidence, it is a groove

Now the arithmetic, because it deserves an answer rather than a pat on the hand.

The reasoning goes: something finished would not keep doing this. That sounds like sense and it is not, and here is why. A body does not run on what is legally true. A body runs on what it has practiced. Everything about that hymn is practice: the same room, the same pew, the same time of day, the same note, and for fifty years a set of associations laid down deeper than anything a person thinks on purpose.

Nine years of the same response is not a message being delivered. It is a groove being followed. It is the same reason a smell can put a woman back in a kitchen that was torn down in 1978. Nothing is being communicated. A path is being taken because it is there.

And there is one practical thing under this. A response that reliable, that physical, and that old is worth mentioning to somebody who knows about such things, a doctor or a counselor, and that is not an unspiritual thing to do. A body affects a soul and always has, and the woman who checks is the wiser of the two.

You are not being informed at eleven twenty on a Sunday, and Psalm 103 says He does not deal with us according to our sins, and it is His Spirit who tells the truth about your standing and not the muscles in your neck.

I am not going to promise it stops

Now the honest part, and I will not tell you what somebody probably told you once with the best of intentions.

I do not know that the throat will loosen. Nobody does. For some people it goes within a season of getting this straight. For others it comes back for years, thinner each time. There is no schedule anywhere in Scripture and I am not going to invent one so this article ends more neatly.

What I will tell you is that the feeling was never what made the pardon real, so it was never in a position to unmake it. You were cleared by a finished act and not by a settled emotion, and Hebrews 10 says by one offering He has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified, and the Spirit is what holds that up on a morning when your body votes the other way.

And here is the thing you are allowed to do, which nobody may have offered you. You are allowed to sing the line while your throat is closed, out loud, badly, in a voice that is not your alto. That is not pretending. Pretending would be telling people you are fine. Saying the true thing while the feeling sits on you is the opposite of pretending: it is telling the truth about the verdict and the truth about the morning at the same time.