Singing Alone (With God)

Life isn’t always fun. Sometimes it’s boring. Sometimes it’s sad. Sometimes you’re tired and sick and overwhelmed.

Yesterday I was tired. A little bit sick. Frustrated I couldn’t do as much as I needed to do.

To meet the deadlines…

To feel like a legitimate adult…

To justify my existence…

But then I crawled under the covers of my bed with my two little girls, both slightly feverish, both soft, both wrapping their limbs around my waist and neck. And I sang them to sleep.

And then I sang while they slept.

I sang only of Jesus. And the singing healed and made whole. Each word and each note re-centered me, reminded me, realigned me.

I forget sometimes how powerful a song can be. How the scripts we’ve written on our hearts emerge, erupt, like spring water from the ground…

Once the girls fell asleep I thought more about the Jesus in my songs, about how truly lovely He is, about how desperately I want to be like Him, and how I ache to love Him well.

I sang TO Him.

I forget sometimes how intimate singing a song to God, just me and God, can be.

One year for Valentine’s Day my husband surprised me at work with his guitar. I was teaching at a college and my office was actually a converted janitor’s closet—tiny. He stepped into the room, closed the door, sat two feet from my face, and played me a song he’d learned just for me.

I think singing to God is like that. Like sitting at His feet, looking in His eyes and saying, “I love You.”

Somehow doing that, sitting with God in love, makes everything else seem small.

When my husband got home last night I untangled my daughters’ limbs and climbed out of bed. I took a picture of them lying there, and thought how beautiful it is for someone you love to lie in your bed, to know they trust you completely.

And I thought about how singing for someone is like that, making ourselves so vulnerable, our shaky voices an imperfect, inadequate offering. But then I though of my favorite song lyrics and imagined myself “Clothed in His righteousness alone//Faultless to stand before the throne.” And I knew God heard my song through love-tinted speakers, my song Christ-washed. And that made it good, and beautiful—the best thing I did all day.