He Cannot Sing Those Songs Any More

There are four of them and he knows every word of all four.

He knows the pauses. He knows where the room usually comes in and where it usually does not, and he knows which of the four has the line in the second verse that got him through the eleven months after his brother died, which is a fact about his life and not a fact about music.

They still get sung. Not everywhere, and less than they used to, but they get sung, and one of them turns up somewhere about every third month.

And what happens is this.

The first two chords go, and something drops in his stomach, and he sings the first line because his mouth is already going, and then somewhere around the second line he stops, and he stands there with his hands in his pockets looking at a point about four feet in front of him until it is over.

Nobody has ever noticed. He is fairly sure of that.

It has been two years since it all came out, and he is not going to describe any of it, and it is not his to describe. It was serious. It was not a misunderstanding or a hard season or anything that gets talked away. There were people involved who did not deserve it, and that is the whole of what belongs on a page.

What he cannot work out is what to do with eleven months.

Because that line in the second verse did something. Not a nice feeling. It held him up in a specific way at a specific hour, more than once, in a kitchen, and he can point to the nights.

And now the whole thing sits there like a house he cannot go back into, and he keeps arriving at the same question, which is: was that real, or was I moved by something a fraud wrote.

And you have four songs, or a book, or a talk you have listened to forty times. Something met you, and the person it came through is not standing now, and you have quietly stopped going near it.

Settled forever, and the settling was never done down here

There is a line in the longest psalm that is worth putting up against this, and its whole force is in where it locates the thing.

Forever, O Lord, your word is firmly fixed in the heavens.Psalm 119:89

Firmly fixed in the heavens.

Not fixed in the person who told it to you. Not fixed in the room where you first heard it, and not fixed in the arrangement of a song. Fixed up there, permanently, in a place nothing that happens down here can reach.

That is the answer to the question you keep arriving at, and it arrives from an angle you have not been looking from.

You were not held up by a song, and you were not held up by the man who wrote it, and neither of them was ever load bearing. It is written that forever, O Lord, Your word is firmly fixed in the heavens (Psalm 119:89), and it is the Holy Spirit who takes what is fixed up there and applies it to a man in a kitchen at three in the morning eleven months running.

Now the question itself, because it deserves a straight answer.

Was that real, or was I moved by something a fraud wrote.

Look at what that question assumes. It assumes the power was in the writing. That the words had a property, and that the property came from the man, and that if the man is hollow then the property was a trick.

But you know that is not how it worked, because you were there. What happened in the kitchen was not a good line landing well. What happened was that the line said a true thing about God, and the true thing about God was true, and something in you took hold of it at an hour when you could not have generated it yourself.

You took hold of something true and true is the whole of what made it work. Scripture says the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two edged sword (Hebrews 4:12), and it is His Spirit who does the cutting and the holding, and He has never once needed the writer to be sound in order to do it.

And now the thing this page will not do.

It is not going to tell you whether those four songs should still be sung, anywhere, by anybody. That is a real question and people are working it out, and it involves the people who were hurt and their voices matter more than any argument about music.

You are not required to settle a public question in order to have your own eleven months back. It is written that each of us will give an account of himself to God (Romans 14:12), and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a man out of a courtroom he was never seated in, so that he can attend to what is actually his.

What is actually yours is a kitchen, an hour, a brother, and something that held.

And the standing with your hands in your pockets deserves one honest word.

That is not hypocrisy and it is not bitterness. It is a man who does not want to be seen singing something in a room where other people might be hurt by it, and that instinct is a decent one, and it comes from the right place.

But it has grown past what it was for. It is not protecting anybody now. It is just a man going quiet on the second line, alone, about every third month, and paying for something he did not do.

You are carrying a caution that stopped protecting anybody a long time ago. Scripture says God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and love and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who can tell a man the difference between a real care for other people and a habit that only costs him.