We spent Friday painting the living room and hallway of my in-law’s home. When we couldn’t quite finish, we had to continue on into Saturday, then leave quickly and meet much of my side of the family for a BBQ. Sore, tired, and almost without any energy left, we then woke up this Sunday morning to face a full day for our senior ministry. Three services in one day. We started our morning with a last-chance practice at 8:00 am and made it to the first of our services at 9:30 am, a half hour drive away. It was quiet, but that service usually is. The seniors there haven’t quite gotten used to us and they are fairly conservative. The next one came at 11:00 am, and then we took a break for lunch. The third senior ministry started at 2:30 pm and so I suppose it’s understandable that by the time that service rolled around, we were dead tired.

My expectations were quite a bit lower by the time the third one rolled around, but we stepped forward as we always do. We had already considered cutting the message short, and ended up doing that. I started greeting seniors until it was time to start. I looked over the group of some thirty seniors and saw heads drooping to chests, eyelids sagging, and I wondered how we would make it through without any energy of our own to offer, but we finally pushed through the rough parts and worked our way to end.

I was singing a song this time called “His Life for Mine,” and we had put the song at the very end because it has a dramatic ending.

His heart was broken, mine was mended
He became sin, now I am clean.
The cross he carried bore my burden.
The nails that held him set me free.

His life for mine, his life for mine
How could it ever be?
That he would die, God’s son would die
To save a wretch like me
What love divine, He gave his life for mine.

Two sentences into the song, I heard weeping and I looked over to see one of the women on the front row crying. She reached for her tissue as tears flooded down her cheeks and she sobbed, literally sobbed. I felt my own tears creeping into my own throat, which is dangerous as I was still delivering the song. I pushed them back and continued on. I continued on even as the sobbing also continued on, and only as I reached the crescendo of the very end did the tears begin to subside and I finished the song with that long, dramatic ending note. It was the most touching experience. She was down to sniffles by the end, and so I stepped forward for the prayer, but then, my own tears were overtaking me and I croaked out the final prayer allowing myself to share in whatever had overtaken her.

I don’t know what broke inside her today, but afterward, I prayed along with her and I helped dry her tears with the tissue she was clinging to. Everyone in the room seemed somehow different after that. I suddenly had forgotten my weariness, my sore muscles, and my mistakes. God had reached into someone’s heart and wrenched it open before all of us and we were in awe. We were humbled at the glimpse of what we witnessed. We knew we had been given a peek of something holy. A revelation of what it means to be human, to be created in the image of God, to witness the presence of the joy and pain that makes up a person’s life and faith.