He Misses the Sound of the Room

Dean stepped off the platform in 2021 and it was the right call and he made it himself and nobody pushed him.

He had led worship at the same church for sixteen years. Not a huge church. Eight hundred people on a good Sunday, two services, a band he had built one player at a time. He was good. He was genuinely good, and the thing about being genuinely good at that particular job is that you find out about it every seven days, in a room, from eight hundred people at once.

Why he stepped off is his own and it involves a decision made by other people about the direction of the church, and Dean disagreed with it, and after about a year of trying he concluded that the honest thing was to go, and he went, and he did it well. No speech. No letter that got passed around. He told the elders in a room and he played one more Sunday and then he stopped.

He is at another church now, a smaller one, and he sits about halfway back with his wife.

Here is what he has told nobody.

He misses the sound. Not the applause; there was not really applause. He misses the specific noise of a room where four hundred people start singing at the same moment, and the way it comes up at you from the front, and the fact that he was the one who had counted them in.

He has caught himself, sitting halfway back, mouthing the counts.

Here is the morning it caught.

The worship leader at the new church, a young man, twenty-six, good, not as good as Dean, came up to him after a service and said, "Hey, someone said you used to lead. Would you ever want to fill in?"

And Dean said, "Oh, I'm out of that."

And the young man said, "Fair enough," and went off, and Dean stood in that lobby with a cup of coffee and understood that he had just declined the only thing he has wanted since 2021, and that he had declined it in under two seconds, and that he could not have told you why.

You know that ache. Something you were right to step away from, that you would not go back to, and there is a sound or a feeling from inside it that you have not found anywhere since, and admitting that out loud sounds like the beginning of a bad decision.

They had opportunity to return

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to say yes to the young man. I am not going to tell you to say no. I do not know your church, or the decision you disagreed with, or whether picking up a guitar in a smaller room would be a gift or a mistake, and anybody who claims to know that about a stranger is guessing in a confident voice.

What I will do is show you a verse in Hebrews 11 that almost nobody reads, because it sits in the middle of the famous chapter and it sounds like a throwaway.

The writer has been listing people who lived by faith and died without receiving what was promised, and then he says this:

And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.Hebrews 11:15-16

They might have had opportunity to have returned.

Stop there. The writer volunteers that. Nobody asked. He goes out of his way to say that going back was genuinely available to them, which means the not going back was a live decision rather than a closed door.

And he does not say they never thought about it. He says: if they had been mindful of it. Which acknowledges, in passing and without alarm, that being mindful of where you came from is a real possibility for a person on a road.

You are not disqualified by having thought about it, and Hebrews 11 mentions the open door without a syllable of alarm. Hebrews 11:15 raises the possibility of returning as a plain fact, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a church lobby with a cup of coffee in it.

And then verse sixteen, which is the one I want you to carry. But now they desire a better country. The verb is present and ongoing. They are not there. They are desiring. That is the whole state being described: people who left something real, who could go back, who have not arrived anywhere yet, and who are wanting.

And the sentence ends: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.

You are somebody God is not ashamed of, in the middle of the wanting rather than after it resolves. It is written that He is not ashamed to be called their God while they are still desiring, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that unashamedness a present fact rather than a future reward.

The sound was not vanity

Now let me be careful, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

What Dean misses is going to sound, to almost anybody who hears it, like ego. A man who misses eight hundred people looking at him. And that reading is so available, and so easy, that Dean has applied it to himself and it is why he has told nobody.

It is the wrong reading.

He does not miss being looked at. He misses a room doing something together that he helped make happen. Those are different, and the difference is enormous, and anybody who has ever led anything knows it instantly. The joy of it is not the attention, it is the collective, and the leader is the person who gets to hear the collective most clearly because of where he is standing.

You are missing the thing that happened rather than the fact that people watched you do it, and Scripture never treats a delight in a gathered people as a vanity. Psalm 42:4 has a man remembering going with the multitude to the house of God with the voice of joy, and the Holy Spirit is what tells the difference between a longing for a crowd and a longing for a mirror.

And I want to name the two seconds in the lobby, because that is the sharpest part of this. He declined instantly. Not after weighing it. Instantly. And the instantness is not a settled conviction, it is a flinch: a man protecting himself from wanting something in public.

You have not made a decision by flinching, and a reflex has never once been the same thing as a discernment. Hebrews 11:16 has people who deliberately desire rather than people who avoid desiring, and the Holy Spirit is what makes wanting something out loud survivable.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If stepping off in 2021 left something heavier than disappointment, or if sitting halfway back has become something you dread rather than something you do, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your wife, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about that church or that decision. That is me refusing to leave you in that lobby by yourself.