Sing It Badly

Third night running at the same table, with the same lamp on, and nothing has come.

It is not that he has stopped believing. He would like that to be clear, mostly to himself. He sits down every night because it matters, and he shuts his eyes, and the thing that used to happen does not happen.

What comes instead is a list. The same four items in the same order, worn perfectly smooth, and he can hear himself running them the way a man runs a card through a reader without looking. His daughter. The thing at work. Somebody at church who is ill. Sorry about today. Amen.

Tonight even the list will not go. He gets to his daughter's name and stops, because the words are so obviously not doing anything, and he sits there in the lamp light feeling like a fraud in his own kitchen. Which is the worst place in the world to feel like one, because there is no congregation to blame and nobody to perform for and it is just a man at a table who cannot produce a single honest sentence.

He gets up to fill the kettle, because that is what a person does.

And standing at the tap with the water going, out of nowhere at all, he hears himself singing.

Four words. In his mother's kitchen accent, which is not his accent. Wildly, comically out of tune, because he has never been able to hold a note and everybody in his family knows it.

A mighty fortress is our God.

And then he stops, because he cannot remember line two, and he stands at the sink with the kettle overflowing and his eyes stinging and no idea whatsoever what just happened to him.

His song, in the night, already with you

There is a psalm that is not tidy. It is a man arguing with his own soul, in public, in writing, and he does not resolve it before the end. He says his tears have been his food day and night. He says, straight out to God, why have You forgotten me.

And in the middle of all that, he says this:

By day the Lord commands His steadfast love, and by night His song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.Psalm 42:8

So hear this said over you, on the third night with nothing of your own coming. You have a song in you that God put there and kept there, and the night you cannot compose anything is the exact night it is for. That is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings a thing to remembrance, which is why the tune arrives before the words do.

Read the ownership in that line, because it is the whole gift and almost everybody reads past it.

His song. Not the psalmist's song. Not a song the man worked up on a good evening and had ready for a bad one. It is God's own song, and the psalmist's part in the transaction is that it is with him. It was put there. It arrived from outside. And it turns up specifically at night, which is when a man has the least of his own to offer.

So look again at what happened at your sink.

You did not compose that line. You could not have composed it. A man in a mine shaft of a soul does not write a sentence like a mighty fortress is our God; a man in that condition writes a list of four items in the same order every night. That line was put in you somewhere around the age of six by people who are mostly dead now, and it sat there for decades doing apparently nothing, and on the third bad night it came up out of you unbidden with the water running.

That is not a failure to pray. That is His song, in the night, exactly as the psalm says.

Now let me take away the thing that is standing between you and doing it on purpose.

You think borrowed words are a lesser grade of prayer. A sort of substitute, acceptable in an emergency, not the real article, and that if you had more in you tonight you would be praying properly.

Where did you get that? Not from the book. The book is full of borrowed words. The psalms were a hymn book before they were anything else, and people sang other men's grief in them for a thousand years and nobody called it fraudulent. When His own disciples said teach us to pray, He did not tell them to be spontaneous. He gave them the words. He handed over a text, and they said it, and it was not less than praying because somebody else wrote it.

Borrowed is not false.

And here is the second thing, and it is the one your particular kind of conscience needs. You are not required to sing it well. That has to be said out loud because you will otherwise quietly disqualify yourself on the grounds of being tone deaf, and every man who cannot hold a note has done that at some point.

The verse does not say a competent song. It says His song. The tune belongs to Him, the words belong to a church you were handed them by, and your entire contribution is that you open your mouth in a kitchen where nobody is listening and make a noise that would empty a room.

Sing it badly. Badly is the point. Badly is proof that it is not a performance.