The Hymn He Sang In The Truck

His father sang one hymn and he sang it badly and he sang it constantly.

Not in church. He went, but he did not sing much in church, which the son used to find funny. In the truck, though, and in the barn, and walking to the mailbox, and under his breath while doing anything that required both hands.

The same one. Forty years of the same one, and never all the way through, and never in the right key, and always the same three or four lines because he probably only ever knew those.

He died in March.

And the son, who is forty six and has a truck of his own, has not been able to sing it since. He has not tried very hard, if he is honest. Twice, and both times about a line and a half in something happened in his chest and he turned the radio on.

He would like to sing it. That is what makes this worth writing about. He is not avoiding grief; he has been about as honest with this as a man can be. He has cried in front of his wife and once, badly, in a parking lot at a feed store, and he is not ashamed of any of it.

He just cannot make the sound come out.

And a thing has begun to happen that he has noticed and has not said to anybody. He has started to feel that the hymn is gone. Not gone from the world. Gone from him, as though it went into the ground in March, and as though a piece of forty years went with it.

Songs are given in the night

There is a strange, offhand line in the book of Job, in a speech by one of the least helpful men in the Bible, and the line itself is true even though the man saying it is mostly wrong about everything else.

So hear this before we go any further, and know it is not my comfort: you are being given something in the middle of this and not after it. His word says God my maker giveth songs in the night, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that handing over, in a cab, in August, five months in.

But none saith, Where is God my maker, who giveth songs in the night?Job 35:10

Take that in the cab. You are being handed something in the middle of this and not after it. The word says God my maker giveth songs in the night, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the giving, in the dark, where nobody expects a gift.

Giveth songs in the night.

Not songs for the night, which would mean prepared in advance and issued for use in a hard time. Songs in the night. The night is the place where the giving happens.

That is a claim about when God does this particular thing. Not at the end of grief, as a reward. In it. During it. In the middle of the worst stretch of a man's life, something gets handed to him that was not there before.

So take this in your truck, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: there is something being given to you in this, right now, in August, five months in. His word says He giveth songs in the night, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the giving, in the dark, where nobody expects to be handed anything.

There was a family in England in the seventeen hundreds who wrote something like six thousand hymns, and the whole theory of it was simple enough for a laborer to use.

A hymn is a true thing put into a man's mouth so it can get down inside him and be there later.

They wrote for people who could not read. Miners, servants, people with fourteen hour days. They knew those people were not going to sit and study, so they put the doctrine in a tune, because a tune goes in and stays in and comes back out on its own on a bad night.

Which is exactly what happened in your father's truck for forty years, and he almost certainly could not have told you he was doing it.

He was not performing worship. He was carrying something around. Three or four lines, badly, in the wrong key, and it went with him to the mailbox and into the barn, and the man was being held up by a hymn he did not know he was using.

The name that got attached to those people started as a joke about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method goes cold. A method with no warmth is a timetable and nothing more. He held both, and for most ordinary people through three centuries, the hinge between them has been a tune sung badly by somebody with their hands busy.