Worship music has been incredibly meaningful to me my entire adult life. My day hardly feels right if I don’t spend time singing to the Lord, especially in the morning as I get ready to face the tasks and challenges before me.

But sometimes, when I’m in a time of grief or sorrow, the worship music goes away. Not because I’m not worshiping the Lord—for that involves so much more than music—but because I’d never stop crying if I kept playing it.

I was in that season recently. No more music flooded my room when preparing for the day. My prayers kept going up, my faith strong and centered, but my emotions needed time to heal.

My church’s special music schedule comes out quarterly, so I always have plenty of time to prepare for the next time I’m on to sing. As my recent scheduled date approached, I thought and prayed about a selection for weeks. I was considering a song that I thought would sound better as a duet, and I asked a friend if she would be interested in singing with me if I picked it. She said yes. But when it came down to it, my heart kept being drawn in another direction, to a song I’ve sang in church several times before. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that it was the right one to sing again. So I contacted my friend and told her maybe we’d sing the song I’d suggested another time, but I needed to follow where God was leading.

I put “practice song” on my daily schedule starting about ten days before the assigned service. That would be plenty of time to rehearse it.

Except the day I was supposed to start practicing, I awoke with a sore throat. It bloomed into a minor cold that seemed concentrated on my upper chest—right around my voice box. I could hardly talk that whole week, which certainly made teaching interesting. The Lord has blessed me with a strong immune system so I usually beat colds in a matter of days. This one kept hanging around. And I kept waiting. I didn’t ask anyone to fill my spot on the music schedule because surely my voice would return. Wouldn’t it?

The Friday before I was supposed to sing was the first time I got a little nervous. Maybe I should have gotten a substitute. But when I awoke Saturday morning, my voice was back and I knew it was going be okay.

I got out my accompaniment track and practiced the song, and I was blown away. Since I’d sung the song before, I already knew the beats and measures, where to breathe, and how long to hold the notes. The practice was so smooth that I grabbed my phone and recorded my second run-through to send to a friend, hardly believing it was going so well.

It was God. God directed me very specifically to that song, and I knew it was so I wouldn’t worry while I was sick, and so I’d still be able to sing at church even with only a little bit of practice beforehand. That’s how God works—He has the tiniest details under control, and when we follow Him He tends to work everything out the way it should go.

The next day my heart was overflowing as I sang in church. If no one else was blessed, I certainly was because I’d seen God’s faithfulness to me in a fresh way. When people came up to me after the service to thank me for singing, I told the story over and over of how God had directed me to the song and then given me back my voice so I could sing it for His glory. I felt like I was glowing with praise.

As I drove home afterward, I kept thinking about that phrase: God gave me back my voice. I’d been sick physically, and God had restored. I’d been in a season of grief, but in that moment I knew—it wasn’t just this one situation in which God had returned my voice. It was time to turn the worship music back on and let my voice lift every day up to Him.

He had restored not just my voice but my soul. The Good Shepherd knows what He is doing.

The music is on again. Thanksgiving has arrived not just on the calendar but in my heart.

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Image by Frauke Riether from Pixabay