And no, God doesn’t “want us dependent.”
What we need to do is to recognize that we need God the same way that we need food, air, and water. We were designed to work that way, so why should it annoy us? We don’t sit there saying, “Oh, man, I hate how annoying it is to waste all that energy on breathing. The feel of oxygen in my blood is so gross.”
Breathing can get annoying and painful when I have respiratory illnesses, or sore muscles around my ribcage, and it can be a real liability if I find myself drowning. But the basic concept isn’t something horrible and degrading.
There are a lot of problems with singing. The trick is that you can’t sing effectively while inhaling or exhaling. Yet you have to keep well-oxygenated to be able to sing, and most of the muscles used for singing are involuntary muscles that you can’t consciously control. You can’t sing well if you aren’t relaxed. Yet long lines of relaxed music are exactly when your breath starts to run out in the middle, and you want to tense up or gasp for breath. It is hard and paradoxical, and no two people have exactly the same capabilities and voices.
And yet, as a singer, I find that breathing has a lot of nice perks and quirks.
A lot of the work of voice training is learning to think correctly about what you are doing, and to notice how your body feels when you are singing most productively. But your instrument can change any minute because of sickness or stuff in your environment, and you never can hear yourself exactly as other people hear you.
But if I only think about the problems and paradoxes and lack of control, I will never be able to sing. If I relax and do what I’ve learned to do, I will sound beautiful. It is easier to do it than to think about doing it, frankly. And in the end, you don’t rely on all the “breath control” stuff that you need when you are a beginning singer. You have a body that knows how to breathe in a way that’s helpful for singing, and you relax and let your body do the job.
Obviously it’s more difficult to trust my need for God than to trust my need for air, but any basic soul and body know all about how to exist within Him. They were made for it. It’s the part of me that has gotten bunged around by other people, and the part of me that likes to sin, that have a problem with Him. But just like with singing, I keep trying and doing it, and I think I’m getting better at it as I go. I may never be one of God’s great divas, but I can be a member of the choir who shows up on time.
But singing is still a mysterious thing that is not really under conscious control, performed in front of lots of other people. Yup, the uncertainty can make you crazy if you let it. But if you just keep doing it, come what may (and what may come is sometimes embarrassing or bizarre), you will be able to sing well most of the time.
So just as singers have to learn to relax when they are nervous, and to relax again when they long to physically push their voices up high or down low, you have the challenge to have faith and a positive attitude when you are feeling your worst and trusting your least.
It isn’t easy and it seems ridiculous, but it’s the way to get things done. And you can learn to do it by practice. Some days will be hard and some easy, and sometimes you will probably receive consolations that make you forget ever having to learn patience and trust. But it can be learned.
Also, if you are experiencing ordinary depression, find out about how to battle “Automatic Negative Thoughts” by fighting the lies your depressive brain feeds you, like all-or-nothing thinking or delusive “logic” that isn’t logical at all. There are a number of good books about this. They have helped me a lot.
