Suddenly I saw again through the eyes of the man I would be, mounted on the magnificent white stallion. I rode back west with my fellow warriors, returning from the front lines of the battle we’d just won. We rejoined our comrades in the great camp of Charis, embracing and shedding tears and slapping each other on the back. Then warriors around me turned toward the masses of untold millions gathered in Charis. The army began to sing, perhaps hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million.

“Elyon miriel o aeron galad, chara domina beth charis o aleathes celebron!”

I added my voice to theirs and sang the unchained praises of the King. Only for a moment did I hear my own voice, amazed to detect the increased intensity of the whole. One voice, even mine, made a measurable difference. But from then on I was lost in the choir, hardly hearing my voice and not needing to.

As we sang to the gathered throngs of Charis, the sheer power of their voices, our voices, nearly bowled me over.

Then suddenly the multitudes before us sang back to us, and our voices were drowned by theirs. We who a moment earlier seemed the largest choir ever assembled now proved to be only the small worship ensemble that led the full choir of untold millions, now lost to themselves. We sang together in full voice, “To him who made the galaxies, who became the Lamb, who stretched out on the tree, who crossed the chasm, who returned the Lion! Forever!”

The song’s harmonies reached out and grabbed my body and my soul. I became the music’s willing captive.

I knew now that all my life I had caught occasional strains of the music of Charis. But it was elusive, more like an echo. All that clatter, all those competing sounds, all the CDs and sitcoms and ringing phones and blowing horns and nagging voices drowned out the real music. I’d spent my life humming the wrong tunes, dancing to the wrong beat, marching to the wrong anthem.

No longer—for at long last I heard, undiluted, the song for which I was made. And I not only heard the song, I sang it!

The galaxies and nebulae sang with us the royal song. It echoed off a trillion planets and reverberated in a quadrillion places in every nook and cranny of the universe. The song generated the light of a billion burning supernovae. It blotted out all lesser lights and brought a startling clarity to the way things really were. It didn’t blind, it illuminated, and I saw as never before.

At long last, things were as they appeared.

Our voices broke into thirty-two distinct parts, and instinctively I knew which of them I was made to sing. “We sing for joy at the work of your hands … we stand in awe of you.” It felt indescribably wonderful to be lost in something so much greater than myself.