The Year the Feeling Stopped

She could always tell when it was going to be one of those nights, about four bars in, and she has never been able to explain that to anybody without sounding ridiculous.

Eleven years she stood at the front of that room. And it was not a performance and she would fight anybody who said it was: she genuinely went somewhere when she sang, and other people went there with her, and there are three or four nights in those eleven years that people in that congregation still talk about, and she was not faking a single second of any of it.

She told God, in a stairwell, at twenty six, that she would never stop singing to Him. She said it because she was so full she had to put it somewhere.

Then, in the spring five years ago, it stopped.

Not the singing. The other thing. She stood in the same room, with the same band, doing the same songs, and it was like being behind glass. And she waited it out, because everybody has a dry month. And the dry month became a season, and the season became a year, and at some point in that year she began to find the whole thing unbearable, because she was standing at the front of a room producing in other people something she was not experiencing, and she could not do it, and so she stopped.

Nobody made her. She told them her voice needed a rest and everybody accepted it kindly.

Four years.

And here is what she believes now, and she has said it to precisely one person and never again: she thinks the absence is the answer. She thinks the years of fire were her, or her twenties, or a room and a band and a moment in her life, and that what is left now that all that is stripped away is the truth of it, and the truth of it is nothing.

You may have read a silence as a verdict. You may have decided that what has gone quiet was the only real evidence you had, and that its going tells you what was always the case.

A sentence written for exactly this person

Now let me put something in front of you that I think you may never have been shown, because it is one verse in the middle of a chapter nobody preaches.

Isaiah is describing somebody. And I want you to notice how carefully the person is described, because every clause matters.

Who is among you that feareth the LORD, that obeyeth the voice of his servant, that walketh in darkness, and hath no light? let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.Isaiah 50:10

You are in a condition Scripture names without alarm and addresses directly. Isaiah 50:10 describes somebody who fears God, obeys, walks in darkness and has no light, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding you upright in it for four years.

Read who this is

Who is among you that feareth the LORD. So this is not somebody who has walked away. This is a person in the right relation to God, described in the language the Old Testament uses for the genuinely faithful.

That obeyeth the voice of his servant. Still obeying. Still doing it.

That walketh in darkness. Present tense. Not: who walked through a dark patch once.

And hath no light. Not dim light. Not a struggle to see. No light.

So Scripture has a category for a person who fears God, obeys God, and has absolutely nothing to see by. That category exists in the text, described without alarm, addressed directly, and given an instruction that has nothing to do with getting the light back.

You are in a condition the Bible names without alarm and addresses directly. Isaiah 50:10 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of a chapter about the servant and stands it beside a woman who stopped singing in the spring.

And now look at the instruction, because it is startlingly plain. Let him trust in the name of the LORD, and stay upon his God.

Stay upon. It is a word for leaning your weight on something. It is a physical image, and it is deliberately physical, because a person with no light cannot navigate by sight and must navigate by contact.

You are told to lean and not told to see, and the instruction was written for people in the dark. That is exactly what stay upon his God means in that verse, and the Spirit of God is the one holding the weight of a woman who has been reading a silence as a sentence for four years.

What the fire was, and what its absence is not

Let me deal with your conclusion directly, because it is intelligent and it is wrong in one specific place.

You concluded: the fire was me, and now that it is gone, what is left is the truth.

Here is the flaw. You are treating one instrument as though it were the only instrument, and reading its silence as data about the whole system. But a feeling is an event in a nervous system, and a nervous system belongs to a woman in her thirties who has had a life since her twenties, and there are eleven thousand reasons for a nervous system to stop producing an effect that have nothing whatever to do with whether God is there.

The absence of a feeling is evidence about the presence of a feeling. It is not evidence about anything else, and you have been treating it as a judgment handed down.

You are reading a silence as a verdict when it was never a court. Scripture describes a faithful person walking in complete darkness and does not once treat the darkness as a report on that person, and His Spirit has been the one keeping her upright in it.

I am not going to tell you it comes back. That would be scheduling the current, and this site never does that. It may come back and it may not, and if it does it may not look like a room and a band. That is God's business.

What is not in question is whether a woman with no light at all is inside. Isaiah answers that before he gives the instruction.