Why I Was Singing

It was a Tuesday in March and there were six of them and it took longer than it should have because of the step.

Ari's father had been in that house for thirty-one years and the front path is narrow, and they came out slowly, and the whole street was quiet in the particular way a street goes quiet when something is happening that everybody has decided not to look at directly.

And somewhere between the door and the car, one of the cousins started singing.

Not loudly. Not a performance. An old melody, the kind you learn before you know you are learning it, and by the second line four of them were on it, and they carried Ari's father down a narrow path in the cold March air singing.

Ari was at the front left corner. He remembers the weight and he remembers the cousin's voice going slightly and then coming back.

And he remembers, with complete clarity, seeing Graham from next door standing in his own doorway in a jumper with no coat, holding a mug, absolutely still.

Graham did not go in. He stood there the whole time, and when they got to the car he raised his hand, and Ari raised his back.

That was seventeen months ago.

Since then Graham has cut Ari's hedge twice without mentioning it. He has said good morning about two hundred times. He asked once, carefully, in the summer, you alright? and Ari said yeah, getting there, and Graham said good, good, and that was that.

Nobody has ever told Graham why there was singing.

He watched the strangest and most beautiful thing that has ever happened on that street, from ten yards away, with a mug in his hand, and nobody has ever explained one word of it to him.

And Ari has thought about this more than he has told anybody. Because Graham is not a man who asks. He would never ask. And in seventeen months of good mornings there has not been one single opening, and Ari has never made one, and he knows exactly why.

If he explains the singing, he has to say what it was for, and what it was for is the thing he has never said out loud on that pavement in eleven years of living there.

So the most extraordinary thing his neighbor has ever seen sits between them, unexplained, twice a day, over a hedge.

And you may have your own version. Something your neighbor has already witnessed about you, that nobody has ever accounted for.

The invitation in the psalm is to come and hear, not to come and agree

Take this off before we go on, because you have carried it over that hedge for seventeen months and it was never yours.

You are not required to explain God to anybody. You never were. Scripture invites people to come and hear what He has done for one person, which is a much smaller and much more honest thing, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your account, who does anything at all inside a listener. Set that down at the gate. It is heavy and it has kept two good men at good morning.

Now hear how the psalm frames it, because the framing is everything.

Come and hear, all you who fear God; let me tell you what He has done for me.Psalm 66:16

What He has done for me.

Not what He is like. Not what everybody should think. Not a case anybody has to accept. One man's account of one thing that happened to him, offered rather than pressed.

That is a form of speech almost nobody can be angry with, because there is nothing in it to disagree with. You cannot argue with somebody's account of their own life. You can decide what to make of it, and that is the listener's business and nobody else's.

And you have an account. Right now, in a house on a street, seventeen months after a Tuesday in March. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does whatever is done with it in another man, and He has never once made a person responsible for the outcome of their own testimony.

Now let me be careful, because there is a ditch on both sides of this.

Nobody is telling you to go and give Graham the explanation this week. That is not the ask on this page, and a man who has never asked for something should not have it delivered to him as a package.

And the singing was not a performance and it was not for him. It was for your father and it was for your family, and it does not owe anybody an explanation to have been worth doing.

The point is only that a door is standing open that neither of you has walked through, and one of you is the one who knows there is a door.

Here is the tender part, and I say it as gently as I can, because seventeen months is not long for a thing like this. What has kept you at good morning is not secrecy. It is that saying why there was singing would mean saying it out loud in daylight on a pavement where you have been a private man for eleven years.

You are able for that. Not one day when the grief is finished, because grief does not finish on a schedule and I am not going to pretend it does. Now, as you are. Scripture puts the invitation as come and hear what He has done for me, and His Spirit is the one who has been standing in that doorway with Graham since March, and neither of them is waiting for you to be composed.

And the honest half. He stood in the cold in a jumper for the whole of it, with no coat, and he did not go in. That is not nothing. That was a man doing the only thing he knew how to do, and it cost him something, and he has never once been thanked for it.