The Tune Before the Words

At about ten past three Sami stopped being able to pray.

He had been at it since nine. Not badly, either. He had gone through everything he had: the requests, the promises, the arguing, the bargaining that he knew was bargaining even while he did it. He had said the names of everybody involved. He had said please in three different ways.

And at ten past three, in a corridor outside a ward, with a vending machine humming and a cleaner two doors down who had stopped mopping in that particular way people do when they have realized somebody is having a night, Sami ran out.

Not out of faith. Out of words. There were none left. He sat there with his forearms on his knees and there was simply nothing.

And then something came up out of him that he had not thought about in thirty-one years.

A tune first. That was the strange part. The tune arrived before he knew what it belonged to, and it was in his grandmother's voice, which is a thing he did not know he still had.

She used to sing the twenty-third psalm over them at night. In Arabic, in a small room with four children in it and a window that did not shut properly, in a slow tune of her own that Sami has never heard anywhere else and has no idea where she got.

Ar-Rabbu ra'i, fala yu'wizuni shay. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

He got about four lines in before he realized he was doing it out loud, and stopped, and looked down the corridor, and the cleaner had gone.

So he did it again. Quietly. Badly, because he does not have her voice and never did, and with two words in the middle that he could not remember and had to hum through.

He is fifty-one years old and he sat in a hospital corridor at three in the morning humming a gap in a psalm.

And he would tell you, carefully, that nothing changed. The situation on the other side of that door was exactly what it had been at nine.

And also that something came off his chest at about the second time through, and stayed off, and he has not been able to explain it to anybody since.

Now let me ask you what came up out of you.

Because if you have had one of those nights, something did. A line. A tune with the words half gone. Four bars of something from a school assembly you have not thought about since you were nine.

He keeps a song in you for the night

Psalm 42 is the one about the deer and the water, and people stop reading before the good part.

The Lord will command His lovingkindness in the daytime; and His song will be with me in the night, a prayer to the God of my life.Psalm 42:8

His song. Not mine. Not one I wrote in the night, which nobody has ever managed, because the night is not when anybody writes anything.

Will be with me in the night. Already there. Present tense possession, in the dark, without having to be produced.

A prayer to the God of my life. And there is the whole thing: the psalmist says the song is the prayer. Not a warm-up to a prayer. Not a substitute for one. The song, which he did not compose and did not have to find, does the work of praying when he cannot pray.

So hear this said over you, in the corridor at ten past three. You have a song in you that God put there and kept there, and the night you cannot pray is the exact night it is for. That is written down, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings things to remembrance, which is His stated job, and which is why a tune arrives before the words do.

Now let me say something about why the tune comes first, because it is not sentiment, it is how a person is made.

The words you learned young went in with music attached, and music is stored in a place that stress does not reach as fast. That is why people who cannot say their own address can sing four verses of something. It is why a nine year old's assembly hymn survives a fifty year old's worst night.

And that is not a psychological curiosity. It is a mercy with a mechanism.

God had a song put into you decades before you needed it, by somebody who was probably not thinking about tonight at all. A grandmother in a small room with a window that did not shut. A teacher at a piano in a hall that smelled of floor polish. Somebody at a graveside when you were eleven who sang while everybody else stood there.

They were laying something down. They did not know what for. And it kept, for thirty-one years, and it came up when you had nothing.

Let me guard the one thing this category always needs guarding on.

Nothing here requires you to be able to sing.

Sami hummed a gap. He does not have her voice and he never did and he was audibly bad at it in an empty corridor. Not one word of this message asks you to do it well, and if you have been quietly excluded from this whole subject because you were told at school that you were not a singer, that ends tonight.

Badly is fine. Badly, alone, half remembered, with a hum where two words should be. That is not a lesser version of it. Scripture says His song will be with you in the night and says nothing whatsoever about the quality of the rendition.

And the borrowing is not a failure either. This is the thing people get wrong. You are not falling back on somebody else's words because your own were insufficient. You are using words that were made to be used, by people who wrote them for exactly this hour and would be delighted to know they still work.

You are holding something a great many people have held, and it took their weight too. That is written into the whole history of the people of God, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a line alive in a person for decades and hands it back at three in the morning without being asked.

There was a man five hundred years ago who put the psalms into the language and the tunes of ordinary people specifically so that a frightened person at night would have something in their mouth. He said he wanted the words in the market and in the nursery and at the deathbed, and that a song a person can sing without thinking is worth more in a bad hour than a sermon they have to follow.