She can still hear what fourteen sounded like, and that is the whole problem.
Fourteen women. Four of them altos, and one alto in particular whose voice sat under everything and made the whole thing feel like it had a floor. They had sung together for six years, most of them since their thirties, and there were about four minutes in one arrangement that she has never heard done that well anywhere since.
Then something came into that congregation. It was real, she has never once doubted that it was real, and within about eighteen months five of those women were worshipping somewhere else.
There was no scene. Two of them told her personally and hugged her and cried. One sent a long letter that was gracious from the first line to the last.
They are nine now. The nine are good, and they work hard, and the alto line is thin and everybody knows it and nobody has ever said it.
She has never said any of this out loud, in six years, because in her mouth it would come out as ingratitude. Something wonderful happened. What kind of woman grieves the choir?
If something thinned out at the exact moment something arrived, come in and put your coat down. Not one of those five women is going to be blamed here.
Gratitude is not a gag
Let us deal with the thing that has kept her silent, because it is a false rule and it has cost her six years.
The rule she is obeying says that if God does something good, everything that was damaged in the process must be reclassified as acceptable, and any grief about it is an accusation against the good thing.
Nobody taught her that. She assembled it herself out of decency, and it does not appear anywhere in the book. Scripture is full of people who thank God and grieve in the same paragraph without either canceling the other.
You are not being ungrateful. Nothing you have lost has ever had to be reclassified as fine in order for what came to be real. I am not saying it to give her permission to complain. Scripture says the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping (Ezra 3:13), which is a day where both were happening at full volume in one place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a woman who can still hear fourteen.
The day nobody could separate the two sounds
Here is what turned this for me, and it takes nothing off what came into your church.
Read what is happening in that chapter, because the detail is exact and it is about sound.
So that the people could not discern the noise of the shout of joy from the noise of the weeping of the people: for the people shouted with a loud shout, and the noise was heard afar off.Ezra 3:13
A foundation is going down. The young men are shouting because something real is being built, and the old men who had seen the first house are weeping out loud, and the account does not tell either group to be quiet.
It does not rank them. It does not say the weeping was faithlessness or that the shouting was shallow. It says the noise was so mixed that nobody could tell which was which, and then it says the sound carried a long way, as though the mixture itself was the thing worth reporting.
You may weep and shout at once, and Scripture records a day when nobody could tell the two apart. That is written into the account itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it into a rehearsal room six years later.
Not one of those five is being blamed
Something has to be said very plainly, or this becomes a quiet indictment of five women who did nothing wrong.
They did not desert her. Each of them made a decision in her own house, for her own reasons, about her own worship, and two of them cried telling her, and the letter was gracious from beginning to end, and not one of them has said a word against that congregation in six years.
And she was not wrong to stay, and what came was not less than she thought it was.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men (Romans 12:18), where the concession admits that not all of it was ever in her hands, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a verdict on five women, who lets her keep them and keep the grief.
And if these six years have cost more than the nine women in that room know, if sleep has gone, if the rehearsals have started to hurt, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.
So here is the turn, and it is not a promise that five voices come back.
This was real and it cost you. You can hold both without deciding which of you was wrong. Scripture records a day when the shout and the weeping could not be told apart (Ezra 3:13), and it is the Holy Spirit, not a ruling on who was right about that season, who lets you thank God and miss the alto line in the same breath.
I cannot tell you what happens to those friendships, or to the sound of that room. Nobody honest would. What I can tell you is that grieving what thinned out is not an accusation against what arrived, and that six years of silence was never required of you.
Declare this over yourself
Say these out loud, in your own voice. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and the standing under these words is His rather than your own. You speak under His will and not yours, and what God does next, and when, is His to decide, however He answers.
- Five voices not in that room, you are a real absence and you are not ingratitude for what came. Ezra 3 has the shout of joy and the weeping so mixed that nobody could tell them apart, and neither one was told to be quiet, and the Holy Spirit was over the whole noise of it. In the name of Jesus I stop calling my grief a complaint.
- Rule that a good thing costs nothing, you are not what God says about me and you are not standing in that rehearsal room on Thursday. Romans 12 says live peaceably as much as lieth in you, which admits the rest was never in my hands, and His Spirit holds me steady with no verdict on anybody. I am grieving this out loud now.
- Father, the people could not discern the shout from the weeping, and the noise was heard afar off, and Ezra 3 reports the mixture without ranking it. I thank You that those five women are still Yours and still mine, and that what came into our church was real, and Your Spirit has carried what I could not put down. This was real and it cost me, and I can hold both without deciding which of us was wrong.
Ezra 3:13
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