The Same Four Lines at the Same Bend

Manu has sung the same four lines at the same bend for eleven years and has never once mentioned it to anybody.

It is on the coast road, about nine minutes out of town, where it comes round and drops and the water opens up on the left. Everybody who lives there knows that bend. Most people do not think about it.

Manu sings there.

Four lines. Not a whole verse of anything, and he could not tell you which hymn it is from, and once, about six years ago, he tried to find it on his phone in a car park and gave up after a while because he did not know enough of the words to search for.

He does not sing anywhere else. Not in a building. Not at a family thing where everybody is singing, where he stands and holds a book and moves his mouth like a man who has been told at some point in his life that he is not a singer. Not in the shower, not in the shed.

Only in the truck. Only on that bend.

And if you asked him about it he would deny it, and not because he is ashamed exactly. It is more that it is not a thing he has words for, and it is very small, and it is his.

He started around the time everything happened with his brother. He did not decide to. He noticed himself doing it about a month in and did not stop.

Eleven years.

Last September his daughter was in the truck with him. She is seventeen and back for a week and they were driving out to get something from somewhere and neither of them was talking.

And they came round the bend and Manu, without thinking about it, did what he does.

And she sang the fourth line with him.

He nearly went off the road.

He did not say anything for about half a mile. And then he said, "How do you know that?"

And she said, "Dad."

And he said, "What?"

And she said, "I have been sitting in this seat since I was six."

Now let me ask you where yours is.

Because you have one. A place and four lines. The kitchen at half six before anybody is up. The bit of the walk between the gate and the postbox. The car park at work with the engine off. Somewhere nobody can hear you, where a small thing comes out of you that you have never described to a living person.

Let it live in you, and it teaches

Paul writes a sentence about singing that has more in it than people usually take out of it.

Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God.Colossians 3:16

Richly dwell within you. Dwell is a word about residence. Not visiting, not being consulted. Living in a place, having its things there, being at home.

Teaching and admonishing one another. And notice how that is joined to the singing. Paul does not put the teaching in one activity and the singing in another. The songs are how the word gets carried between people.

Singing with thankfulness in your hearts. Not in your voice. In your hearts, which lets in every person who was told at school that they were not a singer, and that is a great many people and possibly you.

So hear this said over you, on the coast road nine minutes out of town. You are carrying the word of Christ in you and it has been living there for eleven years, and four lines sung badly at a bend is not a small version of anything. That is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a thing dwelling in a person across a decade nobody was tracking.

Now let me tell you what those eleven years have actually been.

You have been preached to, once a day, on a bend, by yourself.

That is not a joke. Paul says the songs teach. And four lines of a hymn, said out loud in a moving vehicle for eleven years, is somewhere north of three thousand repetitions of a true thing, delivered at exactly the moment the road opens up.

Nobody planned that. You did not build a discipline. It arrived in the year everything happened with your brother and it stayed, and it has been doing a job the whole time that you have never given it credit for, because it is small and because it is not the kind of thing that gets counted.

And here is the other half, and it is the one that got Manu.

Somebody was listening.

Not God, though He was, and that is not the point I am making. A child in a passenger seat, who has been in that seat since she was six, who has heard those four lines several hundred times on the way to school and to the beach and to her grandmother's, and who now has them, and who did not learn them and could not tell you when they went in.

You have been handing something on for eleven years without knowing it and without meaning to. That is exactly what Paul says the songs do: teaching one another, which is a plural, and which happens whether or not anybody has arranged for it.

Let me guard the thing this category has to guard every time.

You do not have to be able to sing.

Manu is not good. He knows he is not good. Somebody told him once, at about nine, in front of other children, and it took. And none of that has made one bit of difference to eleven years of the coast road, because the four lines do not require a voice, they require a mouth.

And you do not have to have the whole hymn. Four lines is not a fragment of a real thing. Four lines is the thing. Scripture never once specifies a quantity, and the psalmist who says God's statutes are his songs does not append a list of how many verses he has.

There was a man five hundred years ago who wrote short verses on purpose, so that ordinary people could carry them in their heads while working, and who said he wanted the songs in the mouths of people who could not read a word. He was not aiming at concert halls. He was aiming at a man on a road.