The Song That Came After the Silence

In 2018, a worship leader named Sarah Groves sat in a parking lot outside her church in Franklin, Tennessee, unable to go inside. For eleven months she had wrestled with a depression so heavy she described it as standing at the bottom of a well, shouting upward into nothing. She stopped leading worship. She stopped writing music. She told her pastor she wasn't sure she had anything left to offer.

But she kept showing up — not on stage, just in the back pew. Week after week, she sat in silence while others sang. She waited. Not passively, but with the kind of desperate, white-knuckled patience that Psalm 40 describes — the waiting that is itself a form of prayer.

Then one Tuesday morning, washing dishes, a melody surfaced. Then words. Then tears. She later told her congregation, "God didn't give me back the old song. He gave me a completely new one."

This is the testimony of Psalm 40. David doesn't say the Almighty prevented the pit. He says Yahweh met him in it, set his feet on rock, and put a new song in his mouth. The waiting wasn't wasted time — it was the space where God was composing something that could only be born in the deep.

Your pit is not your grave. The Most High is not finished writing your song. And when it comes, many will see and put their trust in the Lord.