Never Goes Away

I made a mistake this morning. Or maybe not.

On Sundays, I take it fairly easy. I try not to write for work, but I’ll often go to a coffee shop and surf the Internet, maybe blog a little if I feel inspired. While doing that this morning, I opened up Spotify and saw a Praise and Worship playlist. Curious, I thought I’d see what was playing.

Oops.

Not what you think, though.

I’m not big on “worship music” these days, mostly because I’ve seen it devolve into its own genre/subculture. Most of the tunes I’ve heard in the past few years are basically theologically bereft or bubble-gummy, unrealistic, Jesus-is-my-boyfriend songs, mostly meant to hype up congregations or even sell concert tickets. This isn’t why I signed on for this, and it doesn’t reflect anything close to what I’ve felt in my heart for quite some time. I really haven’t heard a worship album I truly resonated with since about 1999, to be honest, and by the time I stopped having a platform for leading worship, most of the songs on my list were originals because I couldn’t find anything in the current releases that fit the bill. So when I stopped leading worship, I stopped writing congregational songs, and I stopped following the current trends.

Mostly, I don’t miss it.

But every once in awhile, I hear a glimmer of hope. Every once in awhile, a reminder comes along of why we sing to God in the first place. That’s what happened in the coffee shop on Spotify this morning, as I heard Matt Redman sing “10,000 Reasons.”

The simplest of choruses:

“Bless the Lord, O My soul, O my soul
Worship His Holy Name
Sing like never before, O my soul
I worship Your Holy Name”

But the verses speak of the eternity we will spend discovering reasons to bless Him, not entirely unlike my all-time favorite song “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.”

And when I heard it, I knew I’d made a mistake.

Sitting there, headphones on, trying furiously to brush away the tears so no one in the coffee shop would wonder what was happening to that guy in the corner. They weren’t tears of loss. They were tears of the worshiping heart, the heart that still melts when I feel the Lover of my Soul close by.

So much stress in these days. So much turmoil in the election cycle. And as I’ve written here before, I am living with this stark realization of how far the greater church has fallen that they would endorse such an anti-Christian character as Donald Trump, and it haunts me and leaves me disillusioned almost daily.

And for a moment, all of that faded away and I saw beyond this world, to that eternal place in the arms of the Father. After all this time, that’s all it takes to make me melt like wax.

It never goes away. After all these years being outside of a Sunday morning church routine, I can sense God’s presence and feel my heart melt for him. In an instant.

And remember.

It reminded me that despite this journey of uncertainty I’ve been on for so long, I’m not rudderless, nor forgotten, nor drifting. I am my Beloved’s and He is mine. He is still leading me.

It was five minutes that will carry me for months.

So I suppose it wasn’t a mistake, after all.

Although I’m still trying to contain the sniffles. Where’s a napkin?