The Throat That Closed In The Third Song

The third song is the one she likes.

Not the opener, which is always too fast. Not the second, which she has never learned. The third one is the old one, the one with the line about deep water, and she has been waiting for it since the parking lot.

Row four, on the aisle. Her coat over the back of the chair. A paper cup on the floor under the seat with an inch of coffee in it, gone cold during the notices.

They reach the line. She opens her mouth. Nothing comes out.

Not nothing as in she has forgotten the words. The words are right there. Nothing as in her throat has closed over the top of them, the way a hand closes over the end of a hose, and the air that should be carrying that line is now a thin whistle going somewhere she did not send it.

Then the heat up the back of her neck and into her ears. Then her hands. The screen at the front slides further away than it was and stays there.

The man beside her has his hands up and his eyes shut and has noticed nothing, and she is grateful for that in a way she will feel ashamed of later.

She measures the distance to the double doors at the back. Eleven feet, past the sound desk, and she can do it during the instrumental if she goes now.

She goes. Coat left. Cup left.

The tile in the foyer is colder than the floor of the hall. There is a stack of gray plastic chairs against the wall and she sits down sideways on the bottom one with both feet flat, and there is a folding table with an urn on it and a tray of cookies under plastic wrap for afterward.

Through the doors, muffled, the third song finishes without her.

Twenty minutes, roughly. It thins out. It always thins out.

And then the other thing arrives, the one she has never found words for. It is not the fear that stays. It is what the fear appears to mean.

In the supermarket she can call it her body. In the car she can call it her body. But this happened here, in the one room in the whole week she actually wanted to be in, on the one song she had been waiting for since the parking lot, and a sentence has formed in her that she would not say out loud to a living soul.

Maybe I was asked to leave.

That is you, on the edge of a stack of chairs.

Maybe your version is a hand that would not stay up. Maybe it is the row you cannot sit in the middle of any more, or the seat by the door you now arrive early to claim. Wherever it caught you, hear this before anything else: what happened in that room is not a failure of faith. It is not a verdict, it is not a message, and there is nobody in heaven revising their opinion of you over it. I am also not going to tell you what your throat was doing, because I do not know and no one writing can. That belongs to a doctor, and a body that does this to you is worth taking to one.

Where the nearness is actually promised

There is one line in the middle of an old song that settles the whole question of where a person is standing at a moment like that, and almost nobody reads it as a matter of geography. It is.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Nigh means near. That is all it means. It is not a warm word about how God feels concerning sad people. It is a distance word, measuring a gap and reporting that the gap is small.

So read who the small gap is measured to.

Not to the ones with their hands up on the third song. Not to the ones who made it through the whole service. The nearness in that sentence is promised to the broken hearted and to the crushed in spirit, which is not a category of person, it is a condition a person can be in for twenty minutes on a stack of chairs.

And that means the geography of the building turned itself the right way up at the moment you went through those doors. You did not walk out of the presence of God. You are not on the outside of anything. Psalm 34:18 puts the nearest place in that whole building at the coldest bit of tile in it, and it is His Spirit, not my sentence, who makes that true in the foyer while the singing is still going on behind the wall.

Then look at the man who wrote it, because the heading over this psalm is not decoration.

He wrote it after a very bad afternoon in a foreign city. He was in front of a king, in genuine fear of his life, and what he did was let his body go: he scrabbled at the gate and let spittle run into his beard until he looked out of his mind, and the king said get him away from me, and he was put out of the room.

He chose to do it, which is the one difference between him and you, and it makes your case easier rather than harder. He staged a body coming apart in public. Yours did it without asking you first. And the psalm he wrote afterward, the taste and see psalm, comes from a man who knows exactly what the far side of a door feels like.

You have not been removed from anything. The doors of that hall swing both ways, and the word that is written over them is not a word about your performance in the third song, and the same Spirit who carried that verse across three thousand years to you is not stationed at the front with the band.

And look at the second half of the verse, because it does not stop at nearness. He saves the crushed of spirit. Rescue, not sympathy. Something is being done for you and it is being done by Him, and Psalm 34:18 says so in the same breath as the nearness, and the Holy Spirit is doing it while your hands are still strange.