The Year I Led Worship And Heard Nothing

She counts it in Sundays. Seventy eight of them, roughly, since the last time she heard anything.

Nobody in the building knows. That is the part that sits on her chest in the car park afterward. She stands up in front of a room and she means every word she says, and the room is warmed by it, and people find her afterward to tell her that something got through to them, and she thanks them and she means that too.

Then she gets into her car, and the engine turns over, and the quiet in the car is the same quiet that has been in her prayers since a Tuesday eighteen months ago.

She has stopped saying the words out loud at home. Not out of rebellion. It just got too strange to hear her own voice doing in the kitchen what it does on a platform, with nothing coming back either place.

And the accusation she cannot shake, the one that arrives on the drive: you are a performer. You are running on old fuel. You are selling something you have not got.

If you have been the confident one while the private line has been dead for a year, get in. I am not going to explain your quiet to you, and I am certainly not going to call you a fraud.

The gap is not hypocrisy

Let us deal with the accusation first, because you cannot hear anything else while it is talking.

A hypocrite is somebody saying what they do not believe. You believe every word. What you have is a gap between what you know is true and what you have felt lately, and Scripture is full of people standing in exactly that gap and it never once calls them frauds.

You are not a performer. What you carry into that room is true, it was true last Tuesday, and it does not become less true because you cannot feel it on the drive home. I am not saying that to be kind to you. The written word says that if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13), which grounds the whole thing in His constancy rather than in your reception, and the Holy Spirit brings it to bear in a car park at half past twelve.

Notice what that verse does not do. It does not tell you why. It tells you Whose faithfulness the arrangement rests on, and then it stops, and so will I.

Scripture keeps the ones who led and wept

Here is the thing that changed this for me, and it is not a technique for getting your hearing back.

My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God?Psalm 42:3

Read the next few verses some time. The man remembers leading a crowd, the multitude, the voice of joy and praise, the ones keeping the feast. He is a worship leader remembering the room, and he is writing from a dry place, and the whole psalm went into the songbook so that other people could sing it in public.

Sit with that. God put a worship leader's dry season into the material other worship leaders would later sing from a platform.

You are not disqualified. You are standing in the exact place the songbook was written from, and the Word treats that place as holy ground rather than as a scandal to be hidden. That is written down and kept on purpose, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a woman who has been counting Sundays in the dark.

Old fuel is a lie about how this works

The accusation says old fuel. Let us take that apart, gently, because it is doing a lot of damage.

Fuel is the wrong picture. You are not a tank that got filled at a conference in 2019 and has been slowly emptying since. The Word uses a different image entirely, and it matters which one you are living inside.

You are a branch that is in the vine right now, at this minute, whether or not anything is happening in your leaves. The sap does not stop because you cannot feel it moving. Jesus said abide in me, and I in you, as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine (John 15:4), and abiding is a location and not an emotion, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps you in that location whether the day is bright or flat.

That is why people are getting something in the room. Not because you are performing well. Because there is genuinely something coming through you, and it is not being metered by how your week felt.

And if the eighteen months has cost more than anybody around knows, if sleep has gone, if the drive home has started to frighten, please tell somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.