Nothing Left To Praise With

She was raised on it and she has seen it work. That is why this is hard.

Praise opens heaven. Get the praise up and the sky comes open. She has been in rooms where the praise went up and something happened that she will never be talked out of, and she is not about to pretend otherwise.

But this year she has nothing.

Not rebellion. Not backsliding. Just the specific flatness of a woman who has carried more than she has said, for longer than she has admitted, and who now stands in the third row while a room lifts and finds that there is simply nothing in her to send up with it.

And here is where it turns cruel, and nobody intends it. If praise is what opens the sky, then a woman with no praise left is a woman standing under a closed one, and she knows exactly whose fault that is, because she is the only one in the building who knows the tank is empty.

She mouths the words. She has become somebody who mouths the words. And she has started to avoid the front, because being near the front while empty feels like lying.

If you have run out and you are still standing in the room, come and sit down here with me. Nothing you were taught is going to be sneered at, and neither are you.

Praise is not a lever, and it never was

Let us be careful here, because there is something real that must not get thrown out.

Praise is good. Praise is commanded, and it does something in a room and in a person, and I would not take one note of it away from you. The rooms you remember were real rooms.

What went wrong is a small mechanical claim that got attached to it somewhere along the way: that praise is the switch, that heaven responds to volume, that God is moved by the quantity produced. Once that is in place, praise stops being worship and becomes work, and a tired woman becomes a failed engineer.

You are not the reason anything is closed. Nothing about the amount of praise in you has ever determined how God is turned toward you. I am not saying that to excuse the flatness. The written word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), which is God being the one who accounts for our limits rather than being surprised by them, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that hold in a woman mouthing words in the third row.

The songbook keeps the empty ones

Here is what steadied me, and it is not a way of getting your praise back.

O LORD God of my salvation, I have cried day and night before thee.Psalm 88:1

That is the opening line of the only psalm in the book that never lifts. It goes down and stays down and ends in darkness, and it was written by a temple singer, a man whose actual job was leading praise, and it went into the songbook of God's own people and has stayed there for three thousand years.

God kept a worship leader's empty psalm in the collection He gave His people to sing. He did not require it to resolve first.

You have not fallen out of the company of worshippers. The Word itself carries the flat and the empty inside the songbook, on the same page as the loud, and it never once ranked them. That is written down and kept deliberately, and His Spirit is the one who makes it land in a woman who has begun to think her tiredness disqualified her.

Do not swap volume for sincerity

Something must go in the space we have cleared, or a subtler version will arrive by Sunday. Not volume this time. Sincerity. Really meaning it. Getting past your own numbness so it counts.

That is the same lever with a quieter name on it, and it will exhaust you the same way.

You are received in the state you are actually in, and the receiving is not indexed to what you can generate. Scripture says the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise (Psalm 51:17), and despise is the word chosen on purpose to tell you what He does not do with an emptied person, and the Holy Spirit is the One who has been carrying a year of mouthed words as fully as He ever carried a shout.

And if this year has cost more than anybody in that building knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please tell somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.