The Kitchen Went Quiet

She noticed it in somebody else's house, which is the cruel way these things usually get noticed.

She was at her cousin's, in the kitchen, and her cousin was singing at the sink, badly and without thinking about it, the way a person does when their hands are busy. And something in her went cold, and she stood there holding a tea towel, and the thought that arrived was: when did I stop.

A year. Give or take. She has worked it out since and it is about a year.

She sang from six in the morning. Everybody in her family will tell you that. Through the washing up, through the ironing, in the car, half of it hymns and half of it whatever was on the radio in 1994. Her children learned about twenty songs without ever being taught one. Her grandmother sang, and her grandmother's mother sang, and it was never a decision anybody made, it was just what the women in that line did while their hands were busy.

And then it stopped. Not on a day. There was no argument with God, no crisis of anything, and nothing she could point at and say there. It leaked out over a period she cannot date, and by the time she noticed, in her cousin's kitchen with a tea towel in her hand, it had been gone long enough to feel permanent.

The sentence is not I miss singing. It is: if the singing has gone, something must be wrong between me and God, and I do not know what I did.

You know that sentence. It might be singing, or praying out loud, or reading anything at all. Something that used to come out of you without effort has gone quiet, and you have been running an investigation into yourself ever since.

In that psalm, the lifting comes first

There is a psalm that people sing when they are glad, and almost nobody looks at the order of the sentence.

I will extol thee, O LORD; for thou hast lifted me up, and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me.Psalm 30:1

For thou hast lifted me up. The lifting is in the past tense and it is the reason for the singing, not the result of it. David is not singing his way up. He is singing because he has already been brought up, by somebody else, and the whole psalm afterwards is the account of a man who was down and did not raise himself.

So the order in Scripture is: God lifts, then a person sings. Which means a year of quiet in a kitchen is not evidence about your standing with God. It might be evidence about how tired you are.

You are one that God lifts up, and He did the lifting before there was ever a note in you, and He has kept doing it through the whole silent year. That is what the written word says over you and not something warm I invented for a woman holding a tea towel, and the Holy Spirit who is in you right now, quietly, is the evidence that your standing has never rested on what comes out of your mouth while the dishes are being done.

Watch what that does to the investigation you have been running. If the lifting comes first, then a silent kitchen is information about a year that took more out of you than you have admitted to anybody. It is not information about a fault between you and God, and it never had the standing to become that.

The investigation is the heaviest thing in the room

Here is the second thing, and it is the actual weight.

For a year there has been a quiet search for the thing you did. Going back over conversations. Wondering about a bitterness you might be holding without knowing. Checking yourself, gently and constantly, the way you would check a room for a smell.

That investigation has cost you far more than the silence has. And it started from an assumption that Scripture nowhere makes: that the presence of song is the meter by which a person's walk with God is read.

You have been carried through every day of that year, and the carrying did not go quiet when you did. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than waiting at the sink to hear whether anything comes out.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to try singing. Nothing here is suggesting you put worship music on and join in and see what happens. If your kitchen stays silent for another five years you have not stepped one inch outside the lifting of God, because that lifting was never a response to a sound.

And say this too: a year in which the ordinary things go out of a person is worth mentioning to a doctor. That is not faithlessness. It is very often the road the help comes down.

This is where your mouth comes into it, because I am not leaving you with a comforting idea in a quiet kitchen. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud, and speaking is not singing, and there is no tune required. And the thing in the way is not the silence. It is a sentence: something must be wrong and I do not know what I did. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with any authority standing in a quiet room. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in whether they came out in tune.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than sadness, and there are days when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.