The Hymn I Sang In The Worst Week

Four bars in she knew what it was and sat down.

Not dramatically. Nobody noticed, or if they did they assumed her back, which has been a genuine thing this year and which she has occasionally used.

It is the hymn from October. Not October generally. The October, the eleven days of it, when she sang that hymn in a corridor at half past two in the morning because it was the only thing in her that would come out, and again at the end of the week in a room with three other people, and once in a car with the doors shut and the engine off in a way she has never described to anybody.

That hymn did something for her that nothing else has done in her whole life.

And this morning the band played it at ten past eleven on a bright Sunday with the sun coming through and a boy in the row in front eating something out of a paper bag, and she could not stand up.

She has been trying to work out why ever since and the nearest she has got is this: it felt like using it for nothing.

Like taking something out of a drawer where it is kept for one purpose and waving it about on an ordinary morning. Like the hymn would be spent. Like if she sings it on a Sunday when nothing is wrong, then next time she needs it, it will have gone thin.

She stayed sitting for the whole thing.

And afterwards, at the tea, a woman she likes said what a lovely one that was, and she agreed, and heard herself do it.

I call to remembrance my song in the night

Sit down here with your tea, because there is a line in a psalm that does exactly what you would not do this morning, and it is done by a man who is not in the night any more.

The psalm is written by somebody who has been through something. He is remembering it. And in the middle of the remembering he says this.

I call to remembrance my song in the night: I commune with mine own heart: and my spirit made diligent search.Psalm 77:6

My song in the night.

He is not in the night as he writes it. He is out the other side, in the ordinary daylight, and he deliberately reaches back and picks the song up again and puts it in his mouth in a season when nothing is on fire.

That is the exact thing you sat down rather than do.

Hear this at the tea table. You are not protecting that hymn, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has a man calling his night song to remembrance in the daylight on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put it in your mouth in the corridor at half past two and put it in the band's hands at ten past eleven this morning.

Now let me name the fear underneath it, because it is a real fear and it is running on a real premise that happens to be wrong.

The premise is that the hymn has a finite amount in it. That October used a great deal of it, that there is some left, and that singing it on a bright Sunday would spend some of the remainder on nothing.

That is how a bottle works. It is not how a word works.

What is written says His word does not return empty and stands for ever, and a thing that stands for ever is not depleted by use, and the Spirit of God who carried it into a corridor is not running the reserve down every time a church sings it.

Hear this too, and let it stand you up. You are not being careless with something holy, and Scripture is what says so. What is written deliberately reaches back for the night song in a settled season, and the Spirit of God does not ration a hymn, and there is no drawer.

And now the part that will actually help you next time, because there is going to be a next time and I want you ready.

Every one of those bright Sundays is where the hymn gets loaded.

You did not build that song in October. You could not have. In October you were spending, and what you were spending was every ordinary Sunday you had ever sung it on, going back years, in daylight, with a boy in front of you eating something out of a paper bag, and the Holy Spirit had been laying that written truth down in you on every one of them.

The corridor at half past two did not put it in you. Ten years of ten past eleven put it in you.

So the singing on the ordinary morning is not the waste. It is the filling. And if you never sing it again except in the dark, then the next dark will find less of it in you rather than more.