The Song After the Testimony

She has done this about sixty times now and she is genuinely good at it.

A man is at the front with a radio microphone he keeps holding too close, and he is telling them about the eleven years, and about the night in the car outside his sister's house, and about the phone call he made at four in the morning to a number he had written on the back of a leaflet eighteen months earlier and never used.

It is a real story and he tells it badly, which somehow makes it worse to listen to, in the good way. Two rows in front of her a woman is crying properly, not politely. Somebody's dad is looking at the floor with his jaw set.

And she is behind the keyboard with her eye on the man's shoulders, because she has learned that his shoulders drop about a second and a half before he finishes, and when they drop she has to come in underneath him with the pad so that the room is not left in silence with all of that in the air.

She comes in. She holds the chord. She lets him say the last bit over the top of it, and then she lifts it, unhurried, into the song, and two hundred people stand up without being asked.

She is very good at this. It is the thing she does best in the world.

And she has never, not once, had anything of her own to say into that microphone.

She was seven. A holiday club in a church hall with orange squash and a woman called Sheila who did the puppets and had a laugh you could hear from the car park. She prayed with Sheila on a Wednesday, and she has believed every day since, without a gap, for thirty-one years.

That is it. That is the whole account. Nobody found her in a car. She has never been rescued from anything you could name in a sentence. The worst thing that ever happened to her was chicken pox at eleven and a bad two months at university.

Last spring a woman asked her to give her testimony at the ladies' breakfast in March. She said yes immediately, and then spent three weeks trying to build one. She wrote things down and read them back and they sounded like a school report. She tried starting at the university months and it was not honest, because she had not lost God in them, she had just been tired.

Nine days before the breakfast she sent a message saying she had come down with something and was so sorry.

She sat in the car in her own driveway after she sent it, which is where people do these things, and thought the sentence she had been not-thinking for about fifteen years.

I am the music between other people's miracles.

God kept minutes

There is a moment near the end of Malachi where a small group of people are doing something so unremarkable that it would never have got a slot at a breakfast, and Heaven writes it down.

The book has been full of complaint. It is a hard, tired, disappointed generation, and people have been saying out loud that serving God is pointless. And then, in the middle of that, this.

Then they that feared the Lord spake often one to another: and the Lord hearkened, and heard it, and a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.Malachi 3:16-17

Look at what they did. They spoke to each other. Often. About Him.

There is no deliverance in that verse. Nobody is rescued from anything. There is no night in a car, no phone call at four in the morning, no before and after. It is a handful of people in a discouraging decade talking to one another about God and thinking about His name, and God leaning in to listen and calling for a book.

And then the next line, which is the one I want in your hands: they shall be Mine, says the Lord, in the day when I make up My treasure.

Take that as spoken over you. You are written into a book you did not know was being kept, and Malachi 3:16 says who it was written for, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has kept you speaking about God for thirty-one years without a single dramatic reason to keep going.

What is actually in the entry

I want you to notice what the entry consists of, because it is not what anybody at a breakfast would call a testimony.

They feared the Lord. They thought upon His name. That is the whole record. No arc. No collapse and no rescue. A disposition, held over time, in a period when holding it was not paying anybody anything.

Now hold that next to the man with the radio microphone. His account is true and God did it and the room needed to hear it and I will not thin it out by a single word. God moves in car parks at four in the morning and He is glorified in it.

But look at what has quietly happened in rooms like that one, over years, without anybody meaning it. A shape got established. A testimony came to mean a rescue with a visible before and after, and everything else became the introduction to it.

And Malachi is having none of that. The book of remembrance in that chapter was not opened for the spectacular. It was opened for the faithful ones nobody was writing about, and God opened it Himself because He had been listening to conversations that no one else considered worth minuting.

Right now, as you read this, you are inside that book and not in the queue for it. What is written names the people it was kept for and the description fits you exactly, and the Spirit of God has been the One holding you steady in an ordinary life, which is a harder and quieter work than most rescues.

And I am not telling you yours is coming

Here is where I have to be honest with you, because a softer message would say the thing you want to hear and it would be a lie.

I am not telling you that your dramatic story is on the way. I do not know that. Nobody does, and anybody who says otherwise on a stage is guessing with your life.

You may have another forty years exactly like the last thirty-one. Quiet. Undramatic. Sheila and the orange squash and then three decades of turning up. That is a real possibility and I am not going to dress it up as a waiting room.

And if that is what happens, the book is still open at your page, and nothing about your standing with God moves by a millimetre. That is the whole point of Malachi 3:16. The book was written for the people whose lives were not producing headlines, in the exact decade when their lives were not producing headlines, and it was written then, not later, and not once something finally happened to them.

You have a page in it tonight. It is written, and the Spirit is the One who has been putting the entries in while you were busy watching a man's shoulders for the cue.