You Have Been Singing It All Morning

Her thumb finds the bruise before her eyes do.

Six years on this pitch and her hands have learned the fruit better than she has. They turn each apple so the soft side faces in, set it down, reach for the next, half a second ahead of any decision she makes about it. There is another crate under the trestle, a third in the van, then the cash and carry, then a house with four people in it who all need something from her at the same hour.

Around her the morning is doing what it always does. The hardware unit's shutter goes up in one long rattle. A man three pitches down is testing a speaker he is trying to sell, the same eight seconds of a song over and over, never once reaching the ninth. Trolley wheels on wet concrete. A child at the far end has decided that today is the day to be heard. And under all of it the generator behind the fish stall, holding a note somewhere between a B and a C that stopped being a sound an hour ago and became the floor everything else is standing on.

Then she catches herself.

She is singing. Barely moving her mouth, under her breath, four words going round and round. New every morning, new every morning. It is her grandmother's, out of a kitchen that smelled of cinnamon and bleach. She has no idea how long she has been at it. Long enough that her chest has gone warm, and she did not notice that either.

And then she does the thing this whole message is about. She files it under nothing. Something arrived in her that she never sent for, and she puts it straight in the drawer marked not really, because in all her life nothing that turned up over a generator on a Saturday has ever been allowed to count as God.

You do that too.

You stopped asking for the quiet hour a long time ago, and you were not lazy when you stopped. There are people in your house who need you at precisely the hours the books say to be alone. Your shift starts before it is light. Somebody in your family cannot be left. You have read the same advice everybody has read, about a still morning and a closed door and thirty unhurried minutes, and you worked out privately, without ever saying it, that it was written by people whose lives have a door that closes. Yours does not. It is not going to. And you have quietly filed yourself under second class ever since.

The busiest corner in the city was never the wrong address

Start with the weight, because nobody has taken it off you.

You think the reason you've not heard from God is a scheduling failure, and that the failure is yours. Other people got their mornings in order and you did not. And underneath that sits something you would never say out loud: a suspicion that God is available during hours you do not have.

So let me say the plain thing. The noise in your life is not a discipline problem. Your life is loud because it is full, and most of what fills it is people who need you, work that has to be done, and bodies that depend on yours. That is not disorder. That is a life, and a great deal of it is love. God has never once treated a full life as a closed door, and a house with people in it has never needed diagnosing.

Now look at where He put His voice.

Wisdom crieth without; she uttereth her voice in the streets: She crieth in the chief place of concourse, in the openings of the gates: in the city she uttereth her words.Proverbs 1:20-21

You are standing in the exact place wisdom is described as calling from, and the address was never wrong. That is what the word actually locates, and the Holy Spirit is the One who speaks where the traffic is.

Read where she is standing. Not a garden. Not a cell, not a hillside at dawn, not a spare room with the door shut. The street. The chief place of concourse, the old phrase for the spot where the most people cross at once, the gate where the traffic and the trading and the arguing all pile into each other. That is the pitch God chose for His own voice. He went where the people were, and the people were never quiet.

And notice He does not drop the volume to suit the room. She crieth. She lifts it. The delivery was chosen for a loud place on purpose.

Somebody is going to bring up the still small voice, and that one verse has disqualified more busy people than almost any other. Read what actually happened on that mountain. A wind strong enough to break rocks, then an earthquake, then fire, and Elijah arranged none of it and could not have stopped it. The quiet came afterwards because God sent it, not because a prophet had cleared his diary.

And when God did the loudest speaking in the whole book, He picked a city at festival, packed to the walls with people in from every nation there is. He poured out His Spirit in the middle of that crowd, and the street heard Him, every man in his own language. He was not waiting for the visitors to go home. The crowd was the point.

That mouth did not go quiet somewhere in the intervening centuries and leave us holding the transcripts. He speaks today, at the volume of the world as it actually is. Which brings you to the part you get stuck on: that any of this has to do with you, personally, in your week, with your shift pattern and your stairwell and your phone going off in your hand.

So take the crush in Mark chapter five. A crowd so tight around Jesus that people are being carried along by it, and one woman gets a hand to the hem of His coat. He turns round in the middle of the press and asks who touched Him, and His own friends very nearly laugh at Him for it: Thou seest the multitude thronging thee, and sayest thou, Who touched me?

Read that as a man who cannot hear over a crowd and it makes no sense. Read it as the Man to whom a crowd is not noise, and it is the best news you've had all week. Hundreds of hands were on Him. He found the one that came in faith and turned His whole body toward it. Your kitchen at half past six is not a bigger crowd than that, and you're seated with Christ, who has never once lost anybody in a crush.

And if you cannot point to a single moment, no line of a hymn over a crate of apples, nothing warm in your chest, ever, then hear this before anything else. A stretch of quiet is not a mark against you and it is not a mark against Him. He has not moved off the corner He chose. There is no test here that you sat and failed.

You have His voice in the busiest corner rather than only in a quiet one. Proverbs 1:21 puts wisdom crying in the chief place of concourse, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a gap in your day.