But it was not the Faithfulness of God

I was a teenager when I decided to be a musician within the church.

Thankfully, I went to a church that nurtured my talents and bolstered my weaknesses into strengths. Then, I went to college, where I failed Music Theory before I passed it, and where I cried outside of my voice teacher’s office every week. I sat next to musicians in my classes who had played piano since they were four, and each singer I heard could belt across multiple octaves while my voice sounded hushed and scratchy. 

But I tried, really, hard. I taught myself guitar, and I taught myself how to sing more loudly. But all the trying didn't make me feel more comfortable, nor did it give me a sense of belonging. All it did was make me realize all the things I didn’t know, and couldn’t do, and couldn’t be.  

Nevertheless, five years ago, Paul and I arrived at a church with no music director, and I took on the responsibility. I never excelled, but I was adequate and certainly better than a disembodied CD track. I try to be realistic about what I can and can't do; I try to be recognizant about my strengths and weaknesses, but perhaps the biggest weakness has been that I have been alone on stage for the majority of our time in our church. 

I prayed a lot—that I would be replaced by someone more qualified or would have others to join me. It was lonely, and the music that once was life-giving became soul-sucking. A percussionist joined me a couple years ago, which was a continual fount of encouragement. And at the end of last year, a fellow-singer decided to join me, too. But there was still so much more room on the stage, and its expanse seemed to drink up all the music, filling its stomach and becoming a void. 

With our merged church's launch this month, we have inherited a Violaist and another singer. They are the proof of prayers five years ago. They are the kindness of the Lord. 

As I have considered the measure of grace extended to our small church’s music department, I have struggled with a single sentence. More specifically, a single word within that sentence: faithfulness. I have wanted to say: “this is the evidence of God’s faithfulness to me. To his church.” I have wanted to say that it has grown my trust in God. I have wanted to say these things because I have wanted it to be true.

I still find myself working through the messiness of the past few years. I still find myself wanting answers to questions, answers which I know I may not ever have, even on the other side of this earth. To be honest, (as you can count on me to be) God's faithfulness has seemed like an abstract concept and distant thought. I can conceptualize it and theorize it, but my lived experience has seemed juxtaposed to it. That is not to say that God’s faithfulness does not exist, nor is it to even say that I have not encountered it. But this didn’t feel like faithfulness. It didn’t taste the same, and its grain is rougher.

I cannot yet reconcile God’s faithfulness to the events of the past several years. The deaths we saw, the abandonment we experienced, the slander, the loneliness, the sense of being forgotten. I can't shake that off by seeing the fruit of prayers I prayed five years ago because a particular part of me still wonders why it wasn’t answered five years ago. Perhaps I will one day reconcile it in a year or two or ten. But I am not writing to you from one or two or ten years from now. I am writing while the wounds are still fresh and the blood has not yet dried brown. And I write so soon because I know, I know, I know that you have fresh wounds, too, and I refuse to rip off your bandages too soon, lest yours cuts fester and your lesions sting. I'll hold my hand to yours, though, and hopefully, the pressure of that gesture can alleviate the bloodiness or the itchiness of a half-healed wound.

Even more than the complexities I’ve already described, I find it difficult to call this the faithfulness of God because I do not think that getting what I want is an appropriate way to measure God's faithfulness. God's faithfulness is not quantified by what I gain or lose, what prayers are answered, or how long I experience silence. In fact, I’m not sure that God’s faithfulness is quantifiable at all. Instead, I consider that his faithfulness just is or isn’t, exists or doesn’t, and that aspect of his character does not depend on me or my circumstances or you and yours. 

We have evidence for God's faithfulness, within scripture and outside in our earthen lives. And we will squint and grasp when we feel his faithfulness is absent when it slips through our fingers like sand or the string of a birthday balloon, but we ought to know it never really is gone, never leaving, never floating off aloof and unaware. 

That is the push and pull that we face: knowing the unquantifiable nature of God's faithfulness, which cannot disappear, while recognizing that we do feel, at times, that God is anything but faithful to us. 

This isn’t sacrilege, nor blasphemy. It is humanity. Thankfully, and perhaps most potently, we have the example of Christ upon which to gaze. We have him crying on the cross, asking why his father has forsaken him. We know of his death on the tree as certainly as we know of his resurrection from the grave. Perhaps that is the most quantifiable thing about God’s faithfulness: that Christ both died and now lives. Musicians or not, loneliness or not, health or not—the empty grave still announces the faithfulness of the Lord.

But what can I call the Viola? The harmonies that sing at my side? The breath of the congregation singing what is true and good and heady? It is nothing smaller than a sign of God’s kindness to me. I can say that the hum and whine of the church’s song is the sound of God’s tenderness. I can attest that each time I hear it, I am choke back my tears, both because of the beauty of the melody and the gravity of what that specific sound means to me. 

And I think that is what I am beginning to learn about joy, about steadiness within the billows that roll overhead: to name what I see. To call it kindness, or tenderness, or faithfulness. To be specific, accurate, and precise. To recognize when my eyesight is still fuzzy and to rest assuredly that my vision won't always be blurred. And to hope a daring hope which continually looks for the faithfulness of God so that I might call it by its name.