I Cannot Enjoy A Service Anymore

There is a line in the second song that is not quite right.

It is not heresy. Nobody is going to be led astray by it. It is a line about the cross that is imprecise in a way that would matter if you were teaching it and does not much matter when four hundred people are singing it at half past ten on a Sunday morning.

She hears it every time. And the pen comes out, in her head, and she rewrites the line, and by the time she has a better version they are into the bridge and she has missed the whole thing.

That is every week now. Sometimes it is a song, sometimes it is a phrase in the sermon, sometimes it is a thing on the screen.

She is not wrong about any of it. That is the awful part. She is a careful reader and she has been teaching for eleven years and her corrections are almost always corrections.

She used to sing. That is the thing she keeps coming back to. There is a photograph of her at twenty three at a conference with her eyes shut and her hands up, and she does not know that woman anymore, and she cannot remember what year she last stopped watching a service and was simply in one.

If you have an editing pen that will not switch off, you know exactly what I mean. And I am not going to tell you your corrections are wrong.

The pen is not the problem. The permanence is.

Let me describe something, and you can hold it up against your own Sunday.

Discernment is a real thing and the church needs people who have it. A woman who can tell when a line about the cross has drifted is useful, and if she teaches, that carefulness is the whole of her service and it is a gift.

But a gift has a place where it goes. A pen is for a manuscript. And a pen that has been left uncapped is a pen that is also on your hands, your coat and the tablecloth, and after a while everything in the house has ink on it.

The permanence is the cost and it is not the same as the carefulness.

Now read what Paul asks a congregation to do, and read it as a posture rather than as an assessment.

Let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.Philippians 2:3

Esteem others better. That is not an instruction to believe that the man leading the song knows more theology than you. He may not, and Paul is not asking you to hold a factually wrong opinion about anybody.

It is a posture toward a person: to treat the one in front of you as somebody whose life has weight, rather than as a text to be marked.

You are free to sit in a room without marking it, and the freedom is already yours rather than something conditional on finding a service with no errors in it. That is not a rebuke of your carefulness. It is written in Philippians 2:3, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who carries a written line past a person's ears into the place where they actually live.

So the pen has not been faithfulness. You have a place in that room as a worshipper and not as an examiner, and it is yours on Sunday at half past ten. The word settled that before you ever taught anybody, and the same Spirit who inspired it is in the hall while you read this.

What it costs to be in a room you are marking

Here is what happens, and it is worth being precise, because it is not a moral collapse. It is a mechanism.

Attention is single. You cannot both receive a thing and assess it at the same time; you can alternate very fast, which feels like doing both, but the receiving comes in fragments and the assessing gets the run of the room.

So four hundred people have a song and you have a line. They come out with something and you come out with a correction, and both of those are real, and only one of them was what the morning was for.

And there is a second cost that lands on nobody but you. Every service you attend now confirms the position. You leave more certain and less fed, week after week, and eventually the certainty is the only thing you bring home, and a person cannot live on that.

You have permission to receive something imperfect, and the permission was given rather than earned by the service finally being accurate. Philippians 2 puts lowliness of mind toward a person; His Spirit is the one who makes a person able to let a line go past and sing the chorus.

One plain word before we go on, because a page cannot see the room you are in. If part of the reason you cannot stop marking is that somebody near you makes you pay for every mistake, nothing here is asking you to absorb that. Reaching for help is not a failure of humility, and in the United States 988 answers by call or text at any hour.