Prayer & Worship
Everyone around me at church has their hands in the air and I am just standing there feeling nothing. Am I doing worship wrong?
“And David danced before the LORD with all his might; and David was girded with a linen ephod.”
David danced in front of the ark with everything he had as it came up into Jerusalem, wearing a plain linen ephod rather than his royal robes. His wife Michal watched from a window and despised him for it. The chapter holds both reactions in view at once: uninhibited public worship, and someone in the same city who found the whole thing undignified. Scripture does not pretend everyone in the room feels the same.
“Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord;”
Paul tells a mixed congregation in Ephesus to speak to one another in psalms and hymns, and to make melody in the heart. Two things are happening at once: the singing is horizontal, aimed at each other, and it is also internal. Nothing here measures worship by visible emotion. You can be genuinely worshipping while feeling flat, simply telling the truth out loud to the people beside you.
A path forward
Read the words of the next song rather than trying to summon a feeling. Ask whether you believe the line in front of you, and sing it as an act of agreement.
Give yourself permission not to raise your hands. Posture in Scripture varies enormously, and copying somebody else's expression is not more spiritual than your own.
Sing at home during the week where nobody can hear you. A good deal of self consciousness at church is really just unfamiliarity.
Closing verse
“O come, let us worship and bow down: let us kneel before the LORD our maker.”
- Psalm 95:6
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