Twenty-Six Times, On Purpose

She started counting in about February, which is when she knew something had gone wrong.

Four songs. The same four, more or less, in a slightly different order, for what she reckoned was the fourth month running. She began keeping a mental tally from the fourth row, which is a terrible thing to be doing during worship and she knew it at the time.

By March she had started predicting the second one and being right.

And in April, in the car, her husband said something perfectly ordinary about the morning and she heard herself say: I cannot do the same four songs again. I am going to lose my mind.

He looked at her, because she is not that person. She is the one who defends things. She has spent years telling people that it is not a concert and it does not have to be new and that the point is not the setlist.

And she meant every word of that and she still does. That is what has been eating her since April.

Because she is not bored in the ordinary way. It is worse. She stands there and the words go past her and nothing happens, and she has begun to suspect that what is actually wrong is not the four songs at all.

She has not said that second part out loud to anybody, including her husband, including in the car.

There is a psalm that says one line twenty-six times

Let me say the first thing plainly, because the fear underneath April is the real subject and it is not the setlist.

The fear is that the flatness is you. That people whose hearts are right do not stand in a room full of singing counting repeats, and the fact that you can predict the second song means something has quietly gone cold in you over four months.

Hear this, and take it as settled rather than as reassurance: repetition is not the enemy of what you are looking for, and your flatness is not a verdict. That is not my kind reading of a hard spring, it is what stands written in the hundred and thirty-sixth Psalm, which says the same line twenty-six times in a row on purpose, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired that page is the one who has been standing in the fourth row with you since February.

Read the first three verses, and then remember that this continues for twenty-three more.

Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good. His love endures forever. Give thanks to the God of gods. His love endures forever. Give thanks to the Lord of lords. His love endures forever.Psalm 136:1-3

Twenty-six times. In the same words. In the middle of the songbook of the people of God.

Nobody wrote that by accident and nobody wrote it because they had run out of material. That psalm was built for a congregation to say back, and the whole architecture assumes that on the fourteenth repetition a person is not producing a fresh emotion and is not expected to.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a better Sunday: you were never supposed to generate something new every time. The written word contains a psalm that repeats itself twenty-six times over, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been carrying you on a line you have stopped feeling.

Now let me say what a refrain is actually for, because it is not what you have been assuming.

A refrain is not a device for producing a feeling. It is a floor. It is a thing that is there on the morning you arrive with nothing, so that you do not have to arrive with something.

Which means the flat Sundays are the ones the four songs were built for. On the mornings you are full, almost anything would carry you. On the mornings you are empty, you need words that were placed in your mouth by somebody else before you got there, and that is precisely what you have been resenting. What is written was given to a congregation to say back together, and the Holy Spirit works through borrowed words in the weeks a person has none of their own.

And here is the guard, and it matters as much as anything else here.

None of this is a case against a new song. Scripture says sing to the Lord a new song more than once, and it means it, and freshness is a real gift and the people who bring it are not shallow. A room that only ever repeats itself has lost something, and if you say so to whoever chooses, you are not being difficult.

Both are true. What is written holds a new song and a twenty-six fold refrain in the same book without embarrassment, and the Holy Spirit uses each of them for a different week in a person's life.