Nobody To Answer You Back

The lay-by was really only a wide place in the road where the hedge gave out, and from it you could see a whole field of stubble going gold in the late afternoon and a line of pylons walking off toward the town.

Sela had twenty minutes. That was the shape of her week: forty minutes between the end of the cleaning shift at the offices on the industrial estate and the school gate at ten past four, and about twenty of it spent here with the engine off.

The high visibility vest was folded on the passenger seat with her lanyard on top of it. A cardboard air freshener shaped like a tree hung off the mirror and had stopped smelling of anything two years ago. Her phone was wedged in the cup holder at an angle, and when she pressed play the little speaker did what it could.

She sang. Properly sang, windows up, in a car that smelled of floor cleaner.

She had a good voice and had known it since she was eleven. In the years when she still walked into a building on a Sunday, that voice had a job. She was the one at the end of a row who came in underneath a line and lifted it, and there were people around her who knew she would do it and left room for her.

Now she sang the whole thing herself.

And here is the part she could never explain to anybody, because said out loud it sounds like nothing at all.

She would come to the end of a song. The last note would go out of her and stop against the windshield. And there would be nothing. Nobody saying amen. Nobody making that low sound in the back of the throat that means yes. No woman two seats along who caught your eye on the good line. Nobody taking the next line off her because they could hear she was crying and she needed a second.

A tractor went past and the whole car rocked slightly on its springs.

Sela sat with her hands in her lap. Ten to four. She was not backslidden. She was not angry with anybody. She had not been thrown out of anywhere and she was not staying away to make a point either. Her situation was her situation. It had taken four years and a great deal of pain to arrive at, and she had no intention of summarizing it for anybody who asked at a bus stop.

She loved God in that car. That was the plain fact of it and she knew it the way she knew her own name.

But nobody answered her back.

She wiped her face with the heel of her hand, checked it in the mirror, started the engine at four o'clock exactly, and drove to the school.

The last note, stopping against the windshield

Two things I am not going to do, and I want them said at the top so you can relax and read.

I am not going to ask what put you out there. That is yours and it is not the price of admission to anything on this page. Nor will I tell you to go back in, or to stay out. Neither one. This page has not been given your situation, and something that has not been given your situation has no business ruling on it.

So we go at the ache itself, and the ache is accurate. You are not being oversensitive and you are not being ungrateful for what you do have. Being answered back is a real thing that God built into the way His people praise, and the wanting of it is not a flaw in your character. Scripture is full of one voice starting a line and a crowd coming in underneath it, and the Holy Spirit put that pattern in there deliberately.

The people who taught you to expect an answer were not wrong to teach it. The amen out of the back of a room is a real gift and it was doing real work in you, and the fact that it is missing is a genuine loss and not a symptom of anything.

Now hear what has actually been happening in that lay-by, because the record disagrees with your ears.

You have never once sung alone in that car. Not a single time. Zephaniah 3:17 says the Lord your God in the midst of you is mighty, and that He joys over you with singing, and the Holy Spirit carried that line down through three thousand years to a woman with a folded high visibility vest on the passenger seat.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Read where He is standing. In the midst of thee. Not near you. Not at the window of the car deciding whether this counts. In the middle of the room, which in a small hatchback is somewhere around the gear stick, and read what He is doing while He stands there. Singing.

So the last note did not stop against the windshield. It went up into a room where somebody was already singing, and you were the second voice in there and not the first. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit does not require a congregation before He will answer a woman back.

Now let me be honest with you, because a message that only tells you the good half is a trick and you would smell it. His singing over you does not sound like a person. I am not going to stand here and tell you the silence has a noise in it that you have been failing to notice, and I will not hand you a verse and expect it to do the work of a friend. The human voice you are missing is a human voice, and the missing of it is holy, and nobody here is scolding you for it.

But you are His out there. Not on probation. Not on a waiting list. Not filed somewhere under lapsed and reviewed annually. His word says nothing separates us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord, and it hangs no address on that sentence, and the same Spirit who wrote it is riding in a car with a dead air freshener swinging off the mirror.

I am also not telling you that on your own is the plan. I do not believe it is, and I do not think you believe it either, or the ache would not be there in the first place. What I am telling you is what is true of you at ten to four this afternoon, in the situation you are actually in, because God has always dealt with people where they actually are and not where a page thinks they ought to be.

You have not been dropped. Whatever it cost you to end up parked in that lay-by, and it cost you plenty, it did not cost you Him. Hebrews 13:5 says He has told us plainly that He never leaves and never forsakes, and His Spirit put a sentence like that exactly where somebody on their own would be sure to find it.