I Only Remember My Voice Shaking

Not the flowers. Not the vows. Not his face, which everybody says was the best part.

Your own voice, coming out wrong. Thin and unsteady and about half the volume you meant it to be, and the awful awareness in the middle of it that people could hear.

That is what you kept. Twenty nine years and that is the file that survived.

And here is the part that has done the damage, which I doubt you have said to anybody. Somewhere along the way you started treating the shake as information. As if some part of you had known something and was trying to signal it, and you went ahead anyway.

I want to put a stop to that this morning, plainly, because it is a lie that has been allowed to sit in a person's house for three decades and nobody ever came in and named it.

A shaking voice is not a prophecy. It is a nervous system.

Faithfulness that does not run on the strength of the speaker

There is a line in second Timothy that Paul may well have been quoting from something older, and it is about as plain as anything in the Bible gets.

if we believe not, yet he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself (2 Timothy 2:13, King James Version)

Read what that removes. It removes the strength of the human being from the equation entirely. Not their sincerity. Their strength.

Even in the case of somebody whose faith is failing outright, the sentence does not say the arrangement collapses. It says He stays faithful, because staying faithful is what He is, not a response to how well anybody performed.

You are inside something held up from the other end, and 2 Timothy has never once made the steadiness of a voice a condition of anything. 2 Timothy 2:13 says he abideth faithful even where belief is failing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that to a woman who was frightened at a microphone.

Now put your shaking voice against that. A nervous twenty three year old getting through eleven words at low volume is not even in the category of thing that verse is dealing with, and the verse has already covered far worse.

You have been measured against a standard nobody was applying, and the word has never once required a firm delivery. The passage settles faithfulness on His own character rather than on ours, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes that off a page and lays it over a memory.

What the shaking was, since we are naming things

Let me say the ordinary explanation, because ordinary explanations are underrated and this one is almost certainly the right one.

Twenty three years old. In front of every person a young woman had ever met. Doing something enormous and irreversible in public, in a room with terrible acoustics, on nothing since breakfast.

That produces a shake in almost everybody. It produces a shake in people who go on to be extremely happy. It produces a shake in people speaking at their own child's christening thirty years later.

The body does that when the stakes are high. It is not editorial comment.

You were doing a large thing with a small voice, and the size of the thing has never once made the smallness of the voice a verdict on it. It is written that He abides faithful when we do not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman the difference between nerves and knowledge.

Here is a question worth sitting with. If the shake had been a warning, what exactly was it warning you about? You have never been able to answer that, in twenty nine years, because there is no answer. There is just a shake and three decades of a person supplying a meaning for it.

You have supplied a meaning that was never in the memory, and the shake has never once carried a single word of content. 2 Timothy 2:13 puts the keeping of the arrangement on God's own inability to deny Himself, and the Spirit of God is the one who empties out a false reading.

Say it and let your voice do what it does

So here is the assignment, and the whole design of it is that the voice is not being judged.

Go outside if you can. A porch, a step, the end of a garden path in the evening. Somewhere with air.

Say your vows out loud to God. And let your voice do whatever it does. If it shakes, let it shake. If it goes quiet, let it go quiet. If it cracks, keep going.

Nobody is assessing the delivery. That is the point of the exercise and it is the opposite of the day you remember.

You are speaking to somebody who abides faithful regardless, and it has never once mattered to Him how the sentence came out. 2 Timothy 2:13 rests everything on His character rather than on the quality of ours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is standing on a porch while a woman says it badly and means it entirely.

And if you shake, notice afterward that nothing happened. Nothing fell over. That is worth knowing.