The Tuesday with no worship band
The crash did not come through scandal or doubt. It came through an ordinary week that my faith was never built to survive.
“Be still, and know that I am God.”
Psalm 46:10
Nobody warns you that burnout in faith can look exactly like faithfulness. I was serving. I was reading. I was showing up. But every ounce of it was running on a battery that only charged in crowds.
Then came a Tuesday. No event. No band. No lights. Just a kitchen table, a cold cup of coffee, and a Bible I did not want to open. And the silence did not feel like peace — it felt like absence. It felt like God had left the building along with the sound crew.
My first instinct was to manufacture the feeling back. Louder music in the car. A podcast to stir something. Another conference on the calendar in six weeks that I could survive until. I was defibrillating my own spiritual life every couple of months and calling it revival.
The crash was not a fall into sin. It was a collapse into honesty. And honesty, it turns out, is the only ground stable enough to build on.
If you are in your own Tuesday right now — flat, dry, guilty about being flat and dry — hear this: silence is not God's absence. Very often it is His invitation. He is not withholding Himself. He is weaning you off the noise so you can hear the whisper you have been talking over for years.
You are not backslidden. You are being rebuilt. That process is quiet by design.
Randal Lee — The Abide Movement