The Singing You Put Down

You were twenty-six and it was the right decision and you have never once said otherwise.

It was not the singing. Get that clear, because everybody who has ever half heard this story has got it wrong in the same place. Nobody told you singing was wrong. It was the rooms. It was where the work was, and who was in it, and what a girl of twenty-six was expected to be in order to keep going in it, and you looked at the next five years honestly one night in a car park and you knew.

So you stopped. Completely. Not tapered off. Stopped, in a fortnight, and told two people and did not make an announcement.

Eighteen years.

You sing in church, standing in a row like anybody, and you are careful about it, and once, about nine years ago, somebody asked you to do a solo at a carol thing and you said no so fast that the woman flinched.

Here is what nobody has ever said to you in eighteen years, and it is why this is still live.

Not one person has ever told you what the voice was for.

They told you what it was not for. That part you worked out yourself in a car park, alone, at twenty-six, which is not nothing. But in eighteen years no one has ever sat down opposite you and said: right, so what is it for then.

And so what you have is a gift you have treated, for nearly two decades, as a hazard that has been safely contained. And when you sing in a row on a Sunday you keep it down deliberately, and you have never told anybody that either.

Peter names the set-apart people and then names the purpose

There is a verse people love to quote about identity, and it ends with a purpose clause that almost nobody reads out loud, and the purpose clause is the reason all the rest of it is there.

But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should shew forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.1 Peter 2:9

Chosen. Royal. Holy. Peculiar, which in that older English means owned, kept, taken as somebody's personal possession.

Four descriptions of being set apart, stacked one on another, and then a small word that turns the whole verse from a badge into an assignment: that ye should.

That ye should shew forth. Say it out loud. Make it heard. Declare it.

And notice what the setting apart is for. Not for safekeeping. Not for containment. The whole architecture of that sentence is a people taken out of one thing and put to work at another, and the work is announcement.

So take this now, eighteen years in. You were not set apart to be quiet. The written word puts a shewing forth at the end of every one of those titles, and the Holy Spirit is the one who called you out, and being taken out of a room is not the same thing as being taken out of a calling.

Stopping was right. Silence was never the destination.

Now I want to be careful, because there is a version of this that would send a woman back into rooms she was right to leave, and I will not do that to you.

You were right at twenty-six. I believe you. You looked at it clearly and you acted and it cost you a great deal and you have never once complained about the cost to anybody, and there are people who did not stop who would tell you now that you saw something they did not. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it true in you.

That decision stands. Nothing here reopens it.

What I am saying is that a decision to leave is not the same as an instruction to stop, and the two have been welded together in you for eighteen years because nobody was ever there to separate them.

You gave up a room. Somewhere in the following fortnight, without anybody deciding it, you also gave up a voice, and nobody noticed, because everybody was busy being pleased about the room.

You are a chosen and royal and peculiar person and it is written, and the Holy Spirit called you out of the dark for a shewing forth, so eighteen years of a contained gift is not the shape He designed.

The plain hall and what it did with people

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Phineas Bresee refused to let anybody rent a seat, and one of the things preached in that plain room was being wholly set apart to God.

Handed on badly, that teaching becomes a list of the places a person no longer goes, and it produces exactly your eighteen years: a woman defined by a room she left, with nobody in her life whose job it was to say what she had been freed toward.

That is not what happened in that hall, and the reason is practical. The place had work outside its own doors every day of the week, and it was full of people who had put things down, and the leadership's whole business was putting something else into their hands, quickly, before the silence set.

Your silence set. It has been eighteen years and nobody was assigned to you.

The written word ends every title with a purpose, the Holy Spirit called you out toward something, and a gift is not a hazard that has been safely contained.