The Song That Still Takes Your Legs

He is the one they come to.

Not officially. There is no title. It is just that at some point over about fifteen years it became understood that if a thing had gone badly wrong you went and found him, and he would make you a coffee you did not want and then not say very much for a while.

He has sat with a man whose son was in a cell. He has sat with a woman four days after the scan. He has been in more than one kitchen at two in the morning while somebody said the thing they had not said to anybody. He is steady. That is his whole reputation, and it is deserved.

And there is one song.

It has been the same song for eleven years. He has heard it hundreds of times. He knows exactly what is coming, he knows the words are not even especially good, and there is a place about four bars into the second half where something happens in his chest and his eyes go and his legs are genuinely unreliable for a moment.

Every single time. On a Sunday, in the car, once in a supermarket, which was an experience.

He has tried to work out what it is. The chord under the third line, maybe. Something about the way the bass moves. He has taken it apart the way you would take a clock apart.

And he cannot find it, and he has stopped telling people about it, because he is the steady one. Because the man who is called at two in the morning is not supposed to be the man who has to pull over on a slip road because of a chord change.

He thinks it is a leak. Some part of him not fully sealed. Something he should probably deal with.

That is not a leak, and you know it

Let me say the obvious thing first, because you will not say it about yourself.

Fifteen years of kitchens at two in the morning is a real ministry and it has cost you something every single time. You are not going to hear me suggest that the steady part is a mask. It is not. It is a gift, and half the people reading this have somebody like you and do not know how rare it is.

But hear this, and take it as already settled rather than as encouragement: you are not leaking. You have not got a fault in the seal. That is not my kind reading of a tired man, it is what stands written in Zephaniah, where God Himself is described as rejoicing over His people with singing, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired that line is the one who has been meeting you four bars into the second half for eleven years.

Look at what that prophet actually says God does. It is a startling sentence and most people skim it.

The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in His love He will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

He sings. Over you. That is not a metaphor a careful person invented to make God sound approachable, it is in the text, and it is put in the mouth of a prophet who spends most of his book being extremely severe.

So singing is not the soft edge of how God deals with people. It is one of the ways He does it, and this is yours right now rather than pending your ability to account for it: the thing that happens at the fourth bar is not a malfunction. Scripture says God rejoices over His own with singing and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a song do to a body what a song does.

Now the harder part, and it is the reason you have stopped telling anybody.

You have decided that the man who carries other people cannot be a man who is moved. Not in words. You have never thought it that plainly. But it runs everything, and it is why you took the song apart looking for the mechanism, because a mechanism you could manage.

Here is the truth of it. You are not the steady one because you feel nothing. You are the steady one because you feel a great deal and have learned where to put it. Those are opposite things and you have been living as though they were the same, and the written word says the Spirit Himself intercedes with groanings too deep for words, which means the deepest traffic in a person is not verbal and never was.

And you have been given a song that gets past every door you have built.

Once a week, sometimes twice, something comes in under the steadiness and reaches the man rather than the role. You have been calling that a problem. It is the maintenance. It is the only regular hour anybody spends looking after you, and it is God doing it, exactly as the written word says He restores the soul, with the Holy Spirit doing the restoring in the one place you never scheduled.