The Hymn Over The Dishes

Rosalyn has the water hot enough to fog the bottom of the window, and she is singing.

It is twenty till eleven by the clock on the stove. The saucepan from Saturday has chili scorched onto the bottom of it and she has been at it with the green side of the scrubber for six or seven minutes, which is about how long it takes to get through the second verse and back around to the first.

She is not performing. Nobody is in the house. The dish towel with the strawberries on it is over her shoulder the way her mother wore one, and the mockingbird is on the line outside doing four other birds in a row, and the hymn comes up out of her the way it has come up every Sunday morning for three years now. Same time. Same sink.

She could not tell you when it started. There was no first Sunday. There was just a stretch of months where she was not going anywhere, and then one morning her hands were in the water and her mouth was doing the alto part, and it had apparently been waiting.

The water runs. She rinses the pan, sets it in the rack, and starts on the bowls.

Then a car door goes at the end of the block, and something in her stomach drops half an inch.

Because that is the other half of this, and it has nothing to do with the singing. It is the question. Somebody at the hardware store, somebody at a wedding, somebody kind, somebody who genuinely means well and has no idea, tipping their head a little and asking where she has been keeping herself these days, and are they going to see her out sometime.

She would rather almost anything than be asked that.

Not because she has an answer she is hiding. Because she does not have one. Or she has nine, and every one of them is either too long, too bitter, or not true anymore, and the person asking has a paper cup in their hand and forty seconds.

So she stands there with the water running over a bowl and she braces for a question that nobody in this house is going to ask her.

The car goes on down the block. It was never turning in.

Rosalyn shuts the water off. The window is fogged over on the bottom third and the kitchen is quiet except for the last of the water going down. She dries her hands on the strawberries. And then, because the verse was not finished, she finishes it, out loud, to an empty room at twenty till eleven on a Sunday morning.

The song came with you

Somebody put a psalm in the book for a person who was not where the singing usually happened.

The forty-second psalm is written by a man remembering crowds. He can hear them in his memory, the voice of joy and praise, a multitude keeping holyday, and he is not with them. He is somewhere north, by water he can hear, going over what used to be. It is one of the loneliest passages anybody set to music.

And in the middle of it he says this.

Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life.Psalm 42:8

His song shall be with me. Not with them, not back there, not in the building he is picturing. With me, here, where I actually am.

So take it, at your sink. You are His in this room, with your hands wet and nobody watching. I am not inventing that over you. Psalm 42:8 has it written down, and the song in that psalm was the Holy Spirit's doing, put into a man who was nowhere near the crowd. The same Spirit is carrying yours now, which is why it comes up out of you without being sent for. You did not manufacture that singing. It was given.

Now, I want to be straight with you about what this message is not doing, because you have been handled before and you can feel it coming a mile off.

I am not telling you to go back. I do not know your situation, I do not know what happened, and a stranger who tells a person to walk back through a door has taken something serious that is not theirs to take.

And I am not telling you to stay out either. I will not hand you a nice sentence about how you never needed any of it, because that is the other cheap answer, and it would leave you alone with a shrug where an answer should be.

Here is what I am doing. I am telling you what is true about you today, in the room you are actually in, and letting the rest be between you and God.

You have not been unhoused by this. Scripture calls you His workmanship and His dwelling, and the word for what He does with His people is not attendance, it is indwelling, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself doing the dwelling. A body can be in a building and a heart can be a long way off. Yours has been singing.

Then there is the question, and I will not pretend it does not sting.

The reason it lands so hard is not that it is unkind. Usually it is not. It is that it asks you to produce a summary of something that took years and cost you, in the aisle of a hardware store, on demand. You are not obliged to produce that. Not to be kind, not to be honest, not to be a believer. You can say it has been a strange few years, and let it sit there, and go pay for the light bulbs.

You were not put outside anything by not having an answer ready. That is what is written in Romans 8:38, that nothing in the whole creation separates you from the love of God in Christ Jesus, and Paul had already listed everything he could think of before he wrote it, and nothing in it runs on my saying so. It runs on His Spirit, and it is His Spirit holding that sentence open over your kitchen this morning. A question at the end of a driveway is not on the list of things that can do it. There is no such list item.

And nobody here is going to suggest that you sing over dishes because your faith went weak. That is not what happened and it is not true. His song is with you. That is the psalm's own account of it, and the Spirit who gave it has not gone anywhere.