I Stopped Putting Music On

There is a speaker on the shelf in the kitchen and it has not been on since June.

That is not a decision she announced. Nobody in the house has commented on it, which is its own small thing. It simply stopped, the way things stop, and then at some point in August she noticed the silence was now the arrangement.

Music mattered to her. That is the part that makes this strange. There were albums she could not hear the first four seconds of without something happening in her chest. She used to put things on to cook to and to drive to and to get through the worst hour of the afternoon.

Now it goes past. She has tested it a few times, deliberately, with the ones that used to be reliable, and each time it has been like standing next to something rather than in it, and each time she has turned it off after about ninety seconds.

She is thirty six.

The conclusion she has drawn, and has said to no one, is not about the music. Music is fine. Music is doing what it always did.

The conclusion is about her, and it is the reason she stopped testing it, because the testing kept producing the same answer.

The sentence, unsaid: if that does not reach me any more, then something in me is not receiving.

You may know that shelf. The thing that always worked, and what its failing has told you about yourself.

Songs are given, not found

There is a strange half line in the book of Job that most people have never noticed and that says something exact about where songs come from.

But none saith, Where is God my maker, who giveth songs in the night?Job 35:10

Read the verb in the middle. Giveth. Songs are described as something handed over rather than something produced or located, and the giver is named, and the time of the giving is specified.

In the night. Not in the morning. Not once things have improved. The verse pairs the darkest available hour with the giving of music, and it does not treat that as a paradox.

You are dealing with songs that get handed to a person, and Job 35:10 makes God the giver of songs and names the night as the time He gives them, and it is His Spirit who takes a line from a very hard book and lands it on a woman standing in a kitchen with a silent speaker on the shelf.

The complaint in the verse is not about her

Consider the first half, because it is a complaint and it is worth being clear about who it is aimed at.

But none saith, Where is God my maker. Elihu is observing that people in trouble cry out about the trouble and do not ask about the one who made them. That is the charge, and it would be easy to read it as pointed at somebody who stopped playing music.

It is not. She has not stopped asking. She is asking constantly, quietly, in a way that nobody in her house can hear, and the whole reason the silence bothers her is that she cares where God is. The complaint in that verse is about indifference and she is the opposite of indifferent.

You are already doing the thing the verse says nobody does, because the written word puts the charge on people who never ask and she has not stopped asking once, and His Spirit is what turns a difficult passage into a place she can stand rather than one more accusation.

And notice what a song in the night is for. It is not entertainment and it is not a mood improver. In the dark you cannot see, and a song is a thing that comes to you without needing to be looked at, which is precisely what a person in a dark room can still receive.

You are able to receive the one thing that does not need to be looked at, and Job 35 puts the giving in the night on purpose because the night is when nothing can be seen, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is the one who fills.

Where the load is bigger than one person

I want to stop and say something plainly, because this site will not praise anybody for absorbing what one person cannot absorb.

Three months of a silent house, after a lifetime of music mattering, with a conclusion about herself she has told nobody, is a real weight and it is quiet enough that nobody around her will raise it. Tell a doctor plainly that things that used to reach her have stopped reaching her, in those exact words, because that is a well recognized description and it is not a character report. Ask about a counselor, and say the sentence about not receiving out loud to them first. And tell one person in the house why the speaker has been off, because they have noticed and have not asked.

And if the flatness has begun going somewhere heavier, or the thought of not being here has started to feel restful rather than frightening, dial or text 988 in the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a person tonight.

Saying it out loud is not making it real. You are held exactly as much in the season nothing reaches you as in the years everything did, because Job 35:10 names the night as the time songs are given rather than the reason they are not, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that true in the body rather than only in a verse.