Last week I went back to choir after numerous weeks at home with migraines and respiratory infections. One of the songs we are working on is called, “This Is My Word.” It is a very powerful song based on a passage from Isaiah. A friend, Marshall, is in the choir and is working on sign language to go with the song. So last week we spent a bit of extra time on the song., Spending the time made me call attention to the words a bit more than I might otherwise have done. I was able to breathe reasonably well after weeks of illness, and on this day I was able to sing. I ended up spending a lot of the rehearsal getting misty, and it started with this song.
One of the verses of the song begins:
O Lord, when I am weary, when I feel the days I’m living are in vain,
O God, help me be faithful to the Word You have given to proclaim.
It then goes into lines that are God’s response to this lament. This affected me powerfully after so many months of being at home in bed, feeling that I cannot do the ministry that I am called to do. The director stopped and said that she could not begin to imagine what some of us endure… Things just went on from there, and the experience was truly soul-stirring for me. If I can sing the songs without crying, it will be a miracle. If I can’t, then I will not be ashamed of crying in front of people. I used to think that one should not cry when leading worship. I no longer think this. If such emotion is stirred, then weeping openly is a perfectly acceptable response and should be modeled in leadership–not flamboyantly but honestly. Faithfulness to the Word really doesn’t come when I am standing in front of people. It comes when I am enduring the pain and it would be easier to give up. Those emotional, crazymaking moments are the hardest to endure and the times when I most need God beside me, holding my hand.
