The Harmony I Was Not Asked to Conduct

For the singer who has been trying to run the whole room from the third row.

There's a baton in the cupboard at the back of that hall and it has been there since 1994.

Nobody uses it. The current conductor works with her hands, the one before him used a pencil, and the one before that was famously alarming with a rolled-up score. The baton belongs to nobody living and gets moved about twice a year when somebody is looking for the spare fuses.

She thinks about that baton more than is reasonable, because she has spent eleven years trying to conduct a room she sings in.

Not the choir. The other thing. The wider room, the town, the four congregations who share a hall and a car park and almost nothing else. Every conversation she has with somebody from one of the other three, she is listening on two levels: the conversation itself, and a running assessment of whether the distance closed by any measurable amount while she was speaking.

She has never once told anybody she does this. It would sound absurd said out loud, and it feels entirely reasonable from the inside, and she has been doing it since about 2015.

You have been conducting from the third row, and nobody gave you the baton. The written Word puts the prayer for oneness in Christ's own mouth rather than in yours, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying what that prayer asked for.

The Second Track Running Under Every Conversation

Here's what it costs, and the cost is not obvious even to the person paying it.

You cannot be fully in a conversation you are also assessing. Part of your attention is on the person and part is on the scoreboard, and the person can tell, though they will not be able to say what they noticed.

So the very thing you want, which is ordinary warmth between people who love the same Lord, is slightly prevented by the effort you are putting into producing it. Not ruined. Just thinned, in every single instance, for eleven years.

That isn't vanity. Nobody does this because they think they are important. People do it because they care and because nobody has ever told them that the caring does not come with a post attached.

Who Is Actually Asking

Here's Jesus on the last night, praying out loud with His friends in the room:

Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one.John 17:20-21, the opening lines (KJV)

Notice the grammar of it, because the grammar is the pastoral care. He is the subject of the verb. The eleven are being prayed for. The people who would believe later through their word, which is you, are also being prayed for.

Nobody in that room is asked to join the request as a partner. They are all, without exception, inside the sentence on the receiving end of it.

You are named inside that prayer as somebody prayed for, not beside it as a colleague. The written Word keeps the asking in His mouth, and the Holy Spirit keeps you where the sentence puts you.

A Singer Cannot Hear the Blend

Here's what I'd carry out of that hall if I could take a single thing away with me.

Anybody who has sung in a choir knows this and almost nobody applies it anywhere else. You cannot hear the blend from inside it. Your own voice is conducted to your own ears through the bones of your skull, at a completely different balance from what the room receives, and no amount of effort or attention corrects it.

That's why choirs have somebody out at the front. Not because the singers are careless, but because the blend is physically unavailable from where they are standing.

Eleven years of assessing the distance from the third row have been eleven years of listening for something she is structurally unable to hear. The room may be blending beautifully. She would not know, and the not knowing is not a failure of attention.

The blend cannot be heard from inside it, and no amount of effort changes that. The written Word puts the whole of it in front of Someone who is not in the third row, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hears what you cannot.

Nothing Here Says You Have Failed This Prayer

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do you real harm and I won't write it.

You have not failed it, and it is not the sort of thing that is available to you to fail. It was prayed by Christ, on the last night, about people who would believe centuries later, and it has never at any point been waiting on your performance in a car park.

Nothing here comes with a task attached. Nothing here asks you to mend anything, start anything, or take the distance in your town on as a piece of work, because that would be the identical baton painted a nicer color.

You can care about the distance and hold no responsibility at all for closing it. Scripture keeps the asking in His mouth and never transfers it, and the Holy Spirit does the answering rather than the delegating.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Santiago This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.