Asked to Sing at Her Service

The ask came on a Tuesday, on the phone, and it was gentle, and it was the hardest thing anybody has asked her in a year.

Her friend's mother died on Sunday. The service is a week Thursday. And her friend said, would you sing, she loved hearing you, and then said quickly, and it is completely fine if you cannot.

She said yes before she had finished the sentence, because that is what she does, and she has regretted it for four days.

Her own mother died nine weeks ago.

Nine weeks. She can tell you the number without counting because the number is in her the way a bruise is in a shin.

And here is what she knows, with a certainty that has kept her awake since Tuesday. She knows exactly where it will happen. It is not the first verse. The first verse she will be all right for, because the first verse of anything is technique and breath and finding the room. It is the second verse, where the line about the Father comes, and she will be looking out at a family in the front two rows, and she will go.

She has seen it happen to other people. She has watched a singer come apart at a funeral and she remembers thinking, at the time, from the third row, at somebody else's service, in another life: oh, that poor woman.

That is the phrase she cannot stop hearing. That poor woman.

So she has been running it. In the car. In the shower. At two in the morning. Trying to find the arrangement, the key, the breath, the trick that gets her through the second verse without the room noticing anything at all.

And she has not once, in four days, asked God about any of it. She has only tried to solve it.

If anybody has run a second verse in their head at two in the morning like that, stay with me. There is a verse in the first chapter of the second letter to Corinth that takes the whole performance out of it.

Paul says the affliction itself serves them, and he never explains it

Here is the verse, and I want to be exact about what it does and does not do.

And whether we be afflicted, it is for your consolation and salvation, which is effectual in the enduring of the same sufferings which we also suffer.2 Corinthians 1:6

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say the affliction happened in order to teach him something. He does not give a reason for it. He does not tell the Corinthians why any of it landed on him, and if you read the whole letter he never does, not once, not in thirteen chapters.

What he says is that it is not wasted on them. The affliction, as it stands, unexplained, still in progress, is serving the people he is writing to.

That is a different thing from a purpose. A purpose is a reason a thing happened. This is a use God makes of a thing that has happened. Paul never confuses the two and neither should anybody standing at a microphone with nine weeks behind her.

You are held by a God who puts your affliction to use without ever asking you to justify it, and you were held through all nine weeks when nothing about it made any sense at all. 2 Corinthians 1:6 is the written word saying the affliction serves them and never once saying why it came, and the Spirit who breathed that line is in a car at two in the morning with a woman running a second verse.

And the second half of it is the part that matters on a Thursday. Which is effectual in the enduring. Not in the finishing. Not in the recovering. In the enduring, which is present tense, which means while it is still going on.

You are useful to that family in the middle of it rather than on the far side of it, and you were never asked to be past your own before you stood up. 2 Corinthians 1:6 puts the whole thing in the enduring, and the Holy Spirit does not require a woman to be finished before He will use her voice.

The second verse is not the disaster you have been rehearsing

Now let me go straight at the thing that has kept her awake, because she has built it into something it is not.

She thinks that if she comes apart in the second verse, she will have failed the family, ruined the moment, and made the service about herself.

Turn the room around and look at it from the front two rows.

There is a family sitting there in the first week. Somebody has already stood up and said a warm thing that did not land. Somebody has read a poem. The whole hour is people holding themselves together in front of them, and every single one of those held faces is quietly telling that family that the appropriate response to this death is composure.

And then a woman stands up to sing, and in the second verse her voice goes, and she stands there for four seconds and gets it back and finishes the song.

That family will remember that for thirty years. Not as a failure. As the one moment in the whole service when somebody's face said what their chest was doing.

A funeral is not a concert. The room is not scoring her. And the four seconds she is terrified of might be the truest thing that happens in that building on Thursday.

You are not on trial in that sanctuary, and you were never hired to demonstrate anything from a microphone. Nothing anywhere in Scripture makes a singer's composure the measure of her ministry, and the Spirit of God is not standing at the back of that church with a clipboard.

You may also say no, and no is not a smaller obedience

Now I have to be careful, because there is a way of saying all that which quietly locks her into going through with it. So let me open the other door just as wide.

She is allowed to call her friend and say she cannot.

That is not a failure of love and it is not a failure of nerve. Nine weeks is nine weeks. There is nothing in heaven or on earth that requires a woman to stand up at a funeral because she has a good voice and was asked kindly and said yes on the phone before she could think.

And I am not going to tell her which one to do. Sing it. Do not sing it. Sing it and ask somebody to stand next to her. Sing it and tell the family in advance that she might not get through it. Play the recording of it instead. Ask her friend for one more day to decide. Every one of those is a real thing a real woman might do on a Thursday, and every one of them, handed over as instruction, turns that service into a test with a mark at the end of it.

There is no mark. There is a woman nine weeks out with a phone in her hand and two doors in front of her, and both of them lead somewhere God is already standing.

You are free about that Thursday in a way nobody who asked you will think to say out loud, and you were free from the moment you put the phone down. Galatians 5:1 says Christ has made us free and carves out no exception for a woman with a good voice, and the Holy Spirit does not overrule a mourner's own conscience about her own mother.