Too Much, It Says

The keyboard player finds the key change half a beat before anybody expects it, and the whole room goes up with him.

It is a Thursday, which is nobody's idea of a big night. Twenty-eight people in a hall with a radiator that clanks, a folding table of coffee cups at the back, a boy of about nine shaking an egg shaker in roughly the right place. The song is an old one and everybody knows the last chorus, and when the key lifts, the room lifts, and something in Delia's chest lifts with it.

That is the part she has never been able to explain to anybody. It is not a decision. It is not effort. Gladness comes up through her the way water finds a crack, fast, from the floor of her, and for about two seconds her face is doing what her chest is doing and her right hand has come off her lap.

Then the voice.

It arrives the way it always arrives. On time, calm, reasonable, in the tone of plain good sense. Keep it down. You are a lot. Nobody else has a hand up. You are making this about you.

Her hand goes back to her lap. She folds her arms, which is not a decision either, and she sings the last chorus at exactly the volume of the woman beside her. The song ends. Everybody gets coffee. Delia stacks cups and tells the keyboard player it was lovely, and it was.

She drives home hollow. Not sad. Hollow, which is a different thing and harder to say. Something came all the way up to the surface and got sent back down, and there is a space now where it was standing.

And here is what she has never said out loud, because saying it out loud would be too much: she cannot tell you whose voice that is. She has looked. It has no face and it carries no date. She has gone back through the years hunting for the room where it was first said to her and never found one, and the hunting has quietly become a second kind of obedience, as though producing the source would give her permission to stop obeying it.

It has no source she can produce. It has been running her hands for years.

You know the fold. I am not going to guess what taught you it and I am not going to tell you where it came from, because that is not mine to know and it is not what is standing between you and the song. What is standing there is the two seconds. Gladness rises in you, real gladness, the kind nobody manufactured and nobody put on a calendar, and something reaches over and puts a lid on it, and you comply before you have noticed there was anything to comply with. Under the lid is a verdict you have lived beneath so long it feels like weather: that you are too much for a room. I have walked into a Thursday night to tell you who did not hand that verdict down.

The verdict came from a window

Let me take you into the loudest day in the whole Old Testament, because there is a window in it, and the window is why we are here.

The ark of God is coming up into the city at last after years parked in somebody else's house, and the king of Israel is out in front of it in a linen apron with no crown on, dancing with everything he has got. Horns. Shouting. Six steps and an offering, six steps and an offering, all the way up the hill. It is not a tasteful procession. It is the least dignified thing a head of state has ever done in public, and he is doing it on purpose, in the street, in front of everybody.

And above the street there is a window, and at the window there is somebody watching who is not in the street. She sees the leaping and she despises him in her heart before a single word is spoken, which is usually the order these things happen in. Then she comes out and meets him at the door of his own house with the sentence already loaded: look how the king honored himself today, uncovering himself in front of the servant girls.

Notice where that sentence came from. Not from the ark. Not from the priests carrying it. Not from God, who had every opportunity to say something about the dancing and said nothing at all. It came from a window above the celebration, from somebody who was not in it, and it was waiting at the door the moment he got home. You have been living under a verdict on your gladness that was handed down by something that was never in the street with you. I am not saying that on my own authority. Psalm 30 says God loosed the sackcloth off a man and girded him with gladness instead, and the Holy Spirit who put that line into the book is not stationed at a window watching for you to overdo it.

And David said unto Michal, It was before the LORD, which chose me before thy father, and before all his house, to appoint me ruler over the people of the LORD, over Israel: therefore will I play before the LORD.2 Samuel 6:21

Read what he does not say. He does not claim he had not been that much. He does not promise to bring it down next time. He does not argue about volume at all, and there is not one word of apology anywhere in the sentence. He answers a verdict about a room by naming a completely different address: it was before the LORD. Then he goes further and says he intends to be lower in his own eyes than that, which is the sound of a man who has stopped negotiating.

That is the hinge, and I want it under your feet before we go one step further. Your gladness has an address, and the address is not the room you are standing in. Hear where that comes from: it is written into the king's own answer in 2 Samuel 6, before the LORD, said twice in one breath, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence off an ancient page and sets it down under a woman on a folding chair on a Thursday.

Whose face your joy is turned toward

Two people are at the same event and they are facing opposite directions. One is looking at the ark. One is looking down at a man from a window. The dancing does not change between those two views. What changes is who is being consulted about it.

This is why the address matters so much and why I will not let it go. Joy aimed at a room is a performance, and a room grades performances, and a room's grades move with the weather in it. Joy aimed at God is worship, and the room was never appointed the examiner. The moment you hand the marking to the people in the seats, every rising thing in you has to clear an inspection before it is allowed out, and that inspection happens in the two seconds, every time, and it is why the drive home is hollow.

And there is a lie folded up inside the phrase too much that I want to open out. Too much assumes a fixed ration of room and assumes you are taking somebody else's portion of it. But nothing that rose in you on Thursday came out of anybody's allowance. You were not fitted with a lid by the God who sings over His own people. That is not a kind thing I am saying about your temperament. Zephaniah 3:17 says the Lord your God in the midst of you rejoices over you with singing, and the Spirit who inspired a line like that is not the one who has been shushing you at the last chorus.

So let me hand you back what keeps getting confiscated. This is yours: the two seconds before the fold, and everything they were rising toward. His word does not keep a separate policy for people who feel things quickly, and His Spirit is not quietly enforcing one behind it.

One plain thing before we go on, said because I would far rather say it and not be needed. If the hollow you drive home with has gone somewhere dark and stayed there, tell one human being today, out loud, and if you are in any danger at all reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Asking for help is one of the ordinary things a free person does, and there is nothing about it that is too much.