Sound Check In an Empty Room

Eight fifteen on a Sunday, and there are a hundred and eighty empty chairs in front of Terry, and the monitors are doing that faint hum they do when the room is holding still.

He goes down the channels the way he has gone down them for nine years. Kick. Snare. Overheads. Bass, and a wince at bass, because the DI has been intermittent since Easter and nobody has money for a new one and he has stopped mentioning it.

Then vocal. He steps up, says check, hears himself come back off the far wall a half beat late, and adjusts.

Then he sings eight bars of the first song, because that is how you set a vocal, and there is nobody in the room, and the empty chairs take the sound and give nothing back.

Fourteen months.

That is how long it has been. He knows the number the way you know a number you have not told anybody. Fourteen months of standing up there and running the set and doing it correctly and feeling exactly nothing. Not despair. Not doubt, particularly. Just nothing, the way a hand that has fallen asleep is not in pain.

He has not told the pastor. He has not told his wife, though she knows, the way she knows most things. He has considered stepping down twice and both times could not work out what he would say that would be honest and short.

The eight bars end. The hum comes back.

Terry puts the microphone in the clip, checks the monitor mix on channel four one more time, and goes to open the side door because the greeters come at half past.

That is your Sunday too.

Maybe it is not a platform. Maybe it is a class you teach, or the meal you drop off, or the prayer you say at the table with your eyes open because closing them stopped doing anything a while back. You are doing it. You have not stopped doing it. And somewhere in there you started to suspect that doing it without feeling it makes it a performance, and that God notices the difference.

You are inside a covenant that holds on a day nothing is felt, and it is holding right now. Scripture says the faithfulness in this is God's before it is anybody's, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a person steady in the exact stretch where nothing is coming back off the walls.

Habakkuk made a list of everything that had stopped producing

There is a man in Scripture who wrote down exactly what it is like when the evidence runs out, and he did not soften a line of it.

Though the fig tree does not blossom, and there is no fruit on the vines; though the yield of the olive fails, and the fields produce no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold, and there is no herd in the stalls,Habakkuk 3:17

That is a farmer's list, and it is total. Fig, vine, olive, field, flock, herd. Six sources of evidence that God is good, and every single one of them producing nothing.

And the next line does not say the fields quietly came back. It says yet I will rejoice in the LORD. The yet is not resting on the fields. That is the entire point of writing the list first.

You are standing on something that was never resting on the yield, and it is holding whether or not anything is coming up. That is written into the shape of Habakkuk 3 itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who holds a person up in the stretch where the fields are bare.

And look at the last line of that chapter, because almost nobody does: it is addressed to the music director, to be played on stringed instruments. That whole lament, fields and all, was handed to a worship team to lead a congregation in. Publicly. Corporately. The company Scripture calls the bride of Christ is a whole people at once, never one reader in a private romance, and it was that whole people who got handed a song with the fields still bare. Nobody was asked to pretend the figs were fine.

The church is not a mood, and neither are you

Let me name the corporate thing plainly, because it changes what is being asked of you this morning.

When Scripture calls the church the bride of Christ, it means a whole people. A body, a household, a company. It is not a private romance between Christ and a reader, and it never has been. That matters here more than almost anywhere, because a romance runs on feeling and a covenant does not. A romance that stopped feeling anything for fourteen months would be in serious trouble. A covenant that stopped feeling anything for fourteen months is a covenant, doing what covenants do.

You are not in a relationship with God that is measured by your emotional weather. You are inside a people He bound Himself to, and the binding was done in public and in blood and does not fluctuate with the room.

You are held inside a company by a promise rather than by a feeling, and that is settled. Scripture says He who calls you is faithful and that He is the one who does it, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that true in a person who has felt nothing since a Tuesday in the spring of last year.

The dryness is not a verdict

I want to be careful here, because this is where a person gets handed the wrong sentence and carries it for years.

Dry feeling is not distance. It is not sin. It is not evidence that something went wrong between you and God, and it is not a signal that you have been coasting. Scripture never once treats it that way, and there is a whole book of Psalms that proves it: the psalmists say how long out loud, in the songbook, and nobody edited them out for morale.

I am also not going to hand you a routine to fix it. If I gave you a devotional regime this morning you would carry it faithfully for eleven days and then have one more thing you were failing at, and that would be my fault and not yours.

You are not being graded on the temperature, and that has never been the measure. God has said in His word that He remains faithful even when we are faithless, because He cannot deny Himself, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the work in a person during the exact season they cannot feel Him doing it.

What the eight bars actually were

Terry thinks the sound check does not count because nobody was in the room and he felt nothing while he did it.

Turn that over. A man got up on a Sunday when everything in him had gone quiet, drove to a building, went down the channels one at a time, sang eight bars to a hundred and eighty empty chairs, and then went and opened a door for the greeters.

That is not a performance. A performance requires an audience, and there was not one. That was obedience with the lights half on and nobody watching, which is the only kind that proves anything at all about a person.

You have been faithful in the stretch where it did not pay you back, and that is already true of you. His word says He is not unjust to forget the work and the love shown toward His name, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been carrying that through fourteen months of a person doing it anyway.