The Song You Can Sing Without Feeling It

You know about forty children's songs. Fully. Words, actions, key changes, the lot.

You did not set out to learn them. Nobody sits down with a folder and decides to acquire this repertoire. It arrives the way rainwater arrives in a bucket: one song at a time, at a group, in a car, from a plastic speaker in a bedroom, until one morning you realize that you can do the entire thing with the arms and the wide eyes and the sudden shout on the last word, from memory, at seven in the morning, while looking for a shoe.

There is one in particular. You know the one. It has three verses and a bit where everybody has to be quiet and then very loud, and the loud part is the entire reason children love it, and it gets into your head at around ten past eleven at night and sits there like a lodger.

And you are good at this. That is the part nobody says out loud. You do the actions properly rather than doing them ironically at half height like a person hoping to be seen not enjoying it. You do the voices in the story. You do the pause before the good bit. Your five year old asks, at the end, with a face entirely open, whether God hears her when she whispers, and you say yes, always, every single time, and you mean it with everything in you, because it is true.

Then you go downstairs.

And in the kitchen, with the tap running and one plate left, you find that you have nothing. Not doubt. Doubt would be interesting. Just nothing: a low flat hum where the whole thing used to be, a month of prayers that got as far as "God" and stopped, a Bible that has been open at the same page since a Tuesday you cannot place. You are not angry with Him. You have not decided anything. You have simply been running the household's faith off a tank that has been showing empty since before the summer, and you have not told a single person, because how would that sentence even start.

So there are two of you tonight. The one at the top of the stairs, full of conviction, doing the actions. The one at the bottom of them, holding a tea towel, with the tap running.

That is the gap. This one is yours.

The jar was never the point

Let me deal with the accusation first, because it is standing in the room and it has been standing there for weeks.

The accusation goes like this. Fraud. Selling something upstairs that ran out downstairs weeks ago, and every word said to that child tonight a performance.

That accusation is wrong, and it is wrong on a technicality that turns out to be the whole gospel.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.2 Corinthians 4:7

The treasure is in the jar. It is not made of the jar. It does not draw its value from the condition of the jar, and the whole reason Paul gives for the arrangement is precisely so that nobody could ever mistake the power for the pottery.

You are carrying something that stays true on the days you cannot feel a thing. Scripture puts the treasure in an earthen vessel on purpose so that the excellency of the power is seen to be of God and not of us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds that distinction steady in a woman standing at a sink at half past nine with a tea towel in her hand.

What you said to your daughter tonight is true. It was true before you were tired and it is true while you are tired. God hears her when she whispers. You did not manufacture that in yourself and then hand it over; you passed on something you were given, and passing it on accurately is not acting.

You have a faith that is not currently being held up by your own energy. The written word says that if we believe not, yet He abides faithful, for He cannot deny Himself, 2 Timothy 2:13, and there is no clause in that sentence about the month you are having. The Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person attached to Christ on the days when nothing whatsoever is felt at the attachment point.

Running dry is not the same as running out

There is a difference between a dry month and an empty life, and exhaustion is remarkably bad at telling them apart.

A dry month is a real thing with real causes and it is not usually spiritual in origin. It follows broken sleep. It follows a stretch of caring for people who need everything at once. It follows illness, and grief, and a house move, and a job that has been eating more than it agreed to eat. The soul is attached to a body, and the body has been at capacity since the spring.

You were given the words you are handing on, and they were true long before they got to you. Paul writes to a young man about the faith that dwelt first in his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice, 2 Timothy 1:5, which is the same handing on you are doing at bedtime with the actions and the voices, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it down a line of tired people without losing anything in transit.

And it is worth saying what you have not done. You have not stopped. Nobody is making you do the story. There is no rota, no inspection, nobody would know. A person genuinely finished with God does not keep the bedtime routine going out of habit; keeping it going while feeling nothing is not the behavior of someone who has left.

You have a Helper who is praying underneath the sentences you cannot finish. Scripture says the Spirit helps our infirmities, because we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, and He makes intercession with groanings which cannot be uttered. Your prayers this month have got as far as one word, and one word plus the Holy Spirit is not a failed prayer. It is a prayer with a better translator than the fluent ones you used to write.

You are being fed at the same table you have been setting. The psalm has a table prepared and a cup running over and a shepherd doing the preparing, and the guest at that table is not required to have catered it. The Spirit does the feeding here, and He does not check first whether the person sitting down has been productive.