The Tambourine Under the Winter Coats

For the woman who packed her sense of rhythm away after one comment and has left it in the cupboard since.

You know it's down there. Bottom of the hall cupboard, under the white winter coats, in the canvas bag with the broken zip. Silver jingles, one of them slightly bent since about 2016.

You've had to move it twice. Once when the boiler was serviced, once when somebody needed a coat that had slid off its hanger. Both times you picked up the bag, felt the weight of it, and put it back under the coat that had fallen.

That's not an accident. A bag you have deliberately re-buried twice is not a bag you have forgotten about. It's a bag you are keeping somewhere you don't have to look at it.

Something you keep re-covering is something you have not finished with, whatever the cupboard suggests. Scripture puts a timbrel in a woman's hand and calls that worship, while the Holy Spirit has kept something alive in you that a canvas bag has been quietly holding for years.

What That Comment Actually Reached

You can still hear it, which is how you know it went in deep. Short, said lightly, probably in a corridor or a car park, about how some people can't help drawing attention to themselves.

It was not about your timing. Nobody assessed your timing. It reached past everything you were doing and made a claim about your motive, which is the one charge you can never answer, because every possible defense makes it look truer.

You couldn't argue. Arguing about whether you want attention is a conversation nobody has ever won. So you stopped, without announcing anything, and let people assume you'd simply gone off it.

You were never told your worship was poor, you were told your heart was showing off. The written Word puts an instrument into Miriam's hand without a word of apology, while the Holy Spirit hands out no gift on condition that nobody misreads a motive.

That distinction is worth holding onto. A comment about skill you could have practiced past. A comment about motive goes somewhere deeper and stays there, and it takes something other than practice to get it out.

What the Way Back Does Not Require

Here's the honest price of opening that bag, and it's worth reading in full, because you've been assuming a much steeper one.

Establishing who said it is not required of you. Deciding what they meant is not required. You don't have to raise it with them, be reconciled first, or wait for a day when somebody understands what one sentence in a car park did to nine years of Sunday mornings.

Forgiveness is real and God draws a person into it at the hour He chooses. No barrier stands between you and a hallway cupboard. Nobody has to be dealt with before you hold something in your own hands.

You are free to take this up today without settling anything at all with whoever set it down. Scripture makes your worship a matter between you and God rather than a matter of one person's guess about your motive, while the Holy Spirit waits on no conversation that may never happen.

Nothing here has ever needed unlocking by somebody else. It is a cupboard, three coats, and about four minutes.

Who Gets to Rule on a Motive

There's one question underneath all of this, and it deserves a straight answer rather than nine more years of silence.

Who is qualified to say why you were doing it? Not the person in the car park, who saw a woman with a tambourine and drew a conclusion in about two seconds. Not you either, honestly, because nobody reads their own heart cleanly and the attempt usually ends in a fog.

There is exactly one Person who knows, and He has never once told you to stop. That's not a small detail. It's the whole of it, and you have spent the better part of a decade accepting a ruling from someone who had no standing to make it.

The only One who can read your motive has already accepted what you brought Him. The written Word records a woman taking up an instrument in the open air with God's approval on it, while the Holy Spirit searches a heart gently rather than accusing it from a car park.

If there is something in you that needs correcting, He will do it, and you'll know it as kindness rather than as a sting. What happened in that corridor was not that.

The difference is worth learning to tell, because you will meet both again. Correction from God arrives with a way forward attached and leaves you lighter for having heard it. It never makes you smaller in front of other people and it never requires you to stop.

What happened in the corridor left you with no way forward at all. There was nothing to do with it except become less. That is the signature of the other thing, and it is not His.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Jubilee This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.